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MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
THE CRITICAL VIEW OF LIFE 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
INDIVIDUALISM, New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1911 





\ OF PR} 
JAN 27 19276 





MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
THE CRITICAL VIEW OF LIFE 


By yi 


WARNER FITE 


‘O 8 aveEéracros Bios 
> \ > , 
ov Bwrtds avOpworw 
The unexamined life is not fit 


for human living. 
Socrates, in “The Apoloay”. 


NEW YORK 
LINCOLN MAC VEAGH 
THE DIAL PRESS 


CopyrieuT, 1925, py 
THE Drau Press, Inc. 


PRINTED IN U. 8. A. 


THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS 
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 


PREFACE 


The purpose of this essay is to present a moral philoso- 
phy in the form of what may be called a philosophy of 
life. It is not my purpose to offer a ‘‘constructive system”’, 
such as to display an increasing conclusiveness as it ap- 
proaches completion. What I will present is a point of 
view; which becomes necessarily less distinct, and raises 
ever deeper questions, as it broadens towards the horizon. 
And a point of view, because I believe that nothing in 
philosophy, however truly objective (and it is my purpose 
to offer something objective), is either intelligent or intelli- 
gible except as the expression of a point of view, in the last 
analysis inevitably personal. For this reason I have not 
hesitated to speak in the first person, to draw upon personal 
experience, or to give expression to personal opinion, taste, 
or feeling, whenever this would best convey my meaning. 
Somewhat for the same reason the book is not addressed 
exclusively, or perhaps primarily, to students of philosophy. 
It has been my hope to speak intelligibly to every cultivated 
man; to every person curious about the meaning of human 
life as presented, not in philosophy only, but in literature, 
art, and science. 

To those acquainted with my “Individualism”, printed 
in 1911, I would suggest that the point of view of the 
present volume is a further development (and therefore, I 
hope, a juster and more mature expression) of the point of 


view of the former volume. There I was interested in 
Vv 


v1 PREFACE 


tracing the consequences of self-consciousness in social and 
political relations; here in the working of self-consciousness 
throughout human life. The present volume is an attempt 
to follow the motif of self-consciousness—not to the end, 
for there is no end—but until I can follow it no further. 

I take the opportunity of expressing my obligations to 
the friends who have given me the benefit of their judg- 
ment; to Mr. Herbert Agar and Mrs. Agar, whose criticism 
convinced me of the necessity of rewriting some more im- 
portant passages; to Professor Charles W. Hendel, Jr. of 
Princeton University, Dr. Laurence Buermeyer of The 
Barnes Foundation, and Professor $. McClellan Butt of 
the University of North Carolina, former pupils and some- 
time colleagues, who have helped me by their counsel in 
matters innumerable. 

It will be understood that the author alone is responsible 
for the views expressed in the essay. 

W. F. 


Princeton University 
June, 1925 


CHAPTER 


I. 


ite 


III. 


IV. 


VI. 


VII. 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE 


MoraLiry—Wuat Is Ir? . 


§ 1. The meaning of “morality”. § 2. Obligation 
vs, choice. 


THE MorsaL PHILOSOPHER 


§ 3. The orthodox moralist. § 4. The moralist 
as a naturalist. §5. Moral insight. 


THE Many Morat WorxLpDs 


§ 6. Orthodox morality and the aaa eat 
§ 7. The moralities of race, class, and occupa- 
tion. § 8. Differing moral _ tastes. § 9. The 
good men of the moral philosophies. 


THE Locic oF THE STANDARD . 


§ 10. The odiousness of comparisons. § 11. The 
moral standard and the business point of view. 
§ 12. Social utility in law and orthodox moral- 
ity. §13. “Positive” morality. 


THe MorTive or AUTHORITY . 


§ 14. The categorical imperative. § 15. The 
basis of authority. § 16. The authoritarian 
tradition. §17. Austere morality. § 18. Au- 
thority vs, morality. §19. The sentiment of 
reverence. 


THE ORDERED SOCIETY . a ber tr re ae eeLe 
§ 20. The order of reverence. § 21. The utility 
of the reverential order. § 22. The ordered 
society and the biological species. § 23. Or- 
dered relations vs. social relations. _§ 24. The 

decay of reverence and the dawn of morality. 


Tue UNITY oF THE SPIRIT . 


§ 25. Morality among the een § 26. Utility 


and the system of means and ends. 
vii 


PAGE 


24 


40 


“yi 


76 


95 


vill 
OHAPTER 


VIII. 


IX. 


XI. 


XII. 


XITI. 


XIV. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE .  <aaee sees 
§ 27. The forward-looking Rinide 528. An- 
ticipation vs, retrospection. § 29. Imagination 
and the specious present. § 30. Reflective in- 
telligence and the flux of life. 
THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT Re a ye yr a 8S 
§ 31. Intelligence and the serpent. § 32. The 
moral fault and the intellectual. § 33. The 
clever rogue and the simple honest man. § 34. 
The critical life and the question of intelligence. 
§ 35. Intelligence vs. intellect, mathematical 
and logical. § 36. Intelligence personal and 
critical. 
THE BEAUTY OF VIRTUE . 146 
§ 37. Aesthetic taste and oer ee §38. The 
experience of beauty and virtue. § 39. The 
beauty of utility. § 40. The moral ground of 
aesthetic criticism. 
THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE . : . 164 
§ 41. Aesthetic impressions and acientific facts. 
§ 42. History as a branch of art. 
JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE lei; 
§ 43. Judgment vs. criticism. § 44. “Objectivity 
and rationality. §45. The illusion of delib- 
erate wickedness. § 46. “Tout comprendre’’ 
and “tout pardonner’. § 47. The moral ques- 
tion and the practical. 
THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE . we Iwata ON a Wena ae tes 
§ 48. The Epicurean attitude. § 49. An Epi- 
curean confession. § 50. Epicurus and Pater. 
§ 51. Enjoyment and imagination. § 52. The 
enjoyment of friendship and the enjoyment of 
religion. § 53. Serious enjoyment. 
THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 225 


§ 54. The particular nature of man. §55. Bio- 
logical evolution and the experience of thinking. 
§ 56. Thinking and imagination. §57. Imag- 


CONTENTS 1X 


OHAPTER PAGE 
ination and human life. §58. Imagination, 
morality, religion. §59. Imagination and the 
metaphysical problem. 


AVL HEAIGXPERIENCELOP UG ERUTH bec ine) co ots e249 


§ 60. The man of science and the man of culture. 
§ 61. “Mere ideas” and the picture-psychology. 
§62. “Mere feelings.” §63. Science and an- 
thropomorphic prejudice. § 64. Truth and 
satisfied imagination. § 65. Error and lack of 
imagination. § 66. Experience of reality vs. 
coherence and correspondence. 


AN Le HE DC RESENCE? OF (THE DIVINE) ba) ve eee 2nd 


§ 67. Knowledge and “communion with the di- 
vine”. § 68. The motive of knowledge and the 
motive of love. § 69. The idea of God and the 
presence of God. 


XVII. Poetic ILLusIon AND PorTic TRUTH. . . . 301 


§ 70. Poetry and religious experience. § 71. 
Experience as experience of the real. § 72. 
Man as an animal and man as a human being. 


ENDEX: OFF NAMES'# 2 ae boy cle toe wpa eee ee es) ok em et LD 





MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER I 
MORALITY—WHAT IS IT? 


§1. The meaning of “morality”. § 2. Obligation vs. choice. 


§ 1 


HAT is itto be moral? In the following pages 

I shall give my answer to this question and en- 

deavor to make its meaning clear. I shall 

assume that it is the reader’s aim as well as mine to be 
moral. I shall assume also that he will agree with me, in 
the end if not in the beginning, in using the term “morality” 
to cover all that is important in human character and per- 
sonality,—which means, as I aim to show, that morality in- 
volves so much more than is commonly supposed. When a 
man claims to be a better player of bridge or billiards than 
I am, or a better historian or mathematician, or a more 
competent man of affairs, I can admit his claim without 
compunction or feeling of responsibility. These are fields 
in which I have assumed no special obligation of excellence. 
But when he claims to be more moral than I am, I must 
protest—at least if I respect myself. Or if I do make the 
verbal admission, it means that I am allowing him to use 
the term ‘‘moral” in what is for me a conventional sense. 
I admit perhaps that he is more respectable than I am while 


saying to myself that there is something better than re- 
1 


Z MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


spectability. Yet this is not precisely what he means by 
being moral, as little as it is what I can let him mean. If 
we have found something better than morality it seems that 
the word has here been misplaced. In the end each of us is 
standing for something than which nothing can be assumed 
by him to be better. That something, that most important 
thing in life, I take to be the only true meaning of 
“morality”. 

I make this point at the outset because there are some 
persons, in no sense immoral persons, for whom “morality” 
is a term of depreciation; such as the pious Christian who 
insists that mere morality, further described as “worldly”, 
is of little value for salvation; or the man of sensitive taste 
who contrasts morality with spiritual insight; or finally, 
perhaps the etymologist who reminds us that “morality”, 
like the correlative term “ethics”, is derived from a term 
meaning “‘custom”. With all of these distinctions, how- 
ever described, I am more or less in agreement. But to that 
against which the discrimination is made I will not give the 
name of “morality”, preferring rather to describe it as a 
customary and conventional “righteousness”. Etymology 
to the contrary, I shall locate the essence of morality pre- 
cisely in its contrast to custom; following here the usage 
of the plain man who says that to appear in public without 
a collar is doubtless improper but surely not immoral. It 
may be asked why I have not avoided this danger of am- 
biguity by describing my subject-matter in other terms, such 
perhaps as “human nature” or “‘the meaning of life’. My 
answer would be that in this field there are no unambiguous 
terms and that it is my purpose to offer what is known as 
moral philosophy. 

What is it, then, to be moral? As a formal definition I 


MORAN T:v— WintA TS) 1 te 3 


offer the following: morality is the self-conscious living of 
life. Stating this more simply and concretely, I say that to 
be moral is to know what you are doing. The moral man 
is the man who, so far as he is moral, knows what he is 
about, and the immoral man is, thus far, he who does not 
know. But by putting it in this fashion—which, however, 
states the gist of the matter most clearly to myself—I may 
be tempting some more fastidious reader to reject the answer 
once for all as vulgar nonsense. I will then try to put it 
more acceptably by saying that to be moral is to be thought- 
ful; to be conscious; which to me means to be self- 
conscious; to live one’s life, if possible, in the clear con- 
sciousness of living. And to be thoughtful, intelligent, 
self-conscious—what is this but to be conscientious and re- 
sponsible? Surely we seem to be close to morality now. 
On the other hand, to be thoughtful, always to know what 
you are doing, is to be critical; to live, not by habit and in- 
stinct, but by judgment and choice. 

For this conception of morality I might perhaps offer 
reputable authority by quoting those two famous sayings 
of Socrates, ‘Virtue is knowledge” and “Know thyself”, 
and I might then call myself a disciple of Socrates. The 
trouble here is that there seems to be no moral philosopher 
who is not “‘a disciple of Socrates”. It is from the Platonic 
Socrates, however, as he speaks in the “Apology” that I 
have taken the text for my title-page. ‘O 8 dve£éraoros Bios 
od Bwrds dvOpirw. ‘“The unexamined life is not fit for human 
living”. The examined life—in other words, the critical 
life. The moral life, as I conceive it, is the examined life. 
Given the examined life, I say that nothing else is needed. 

But I may also suggest what is meant by referring to the 
theory of aesthetic of Benedetto Croce. According to Croce, 


4 M:O:R7A LPH Os 0 Parity 


beauty is a question of expression; and not at all a question 
of what is expressed. Here he contradicts Aristotle, for 
example, who says that some subjects (e. g., some persons) 
are suitable for tragedy, others are not. Croce’s theory is 
implied in the remark, by whom I know not, that any man 
could write an interesting autobiography if only he would 
give a faithful record of his life. Any man might thus 
claim for his life a dramatic dignity if only he could ex- 
press what he has lived through. Well, Croce’s conception 
of beauty is the conception to be offered here of morality. 
Morality, if you please, is expression. There are no kinds 
of human nature that are intrinsically moral, others in- 
trinsically immoral. A man is moral, or immoral, so far 
as he expresses his own nature, so far as he lives his life 
knowingly. 


§ 2 

Given, then, the examined life, or the life that knows or 
expresses itself, I say that nothing else is needed. ‘This 
gives the central point of my position and at the same time 
the issue with which the discussion will be everywhere con- 
fronted. For there will be many to retort by saying, Grant- 
ing the examined life, something else is needed. It is not 
enough to live your life thoughtfully, you must reach the 
right conclusions. Otherwise your thinking will be value- 
less. And morality is not so much a matter of what you 
think as of what you do. It is a question, not of motive, 
but of act. The road to hell is paved with good inten- 
tions. The Grand Inquisitors were doubtless thoroughly 
conscientious—therefore all the more dangerous. The 
more intelligent man may be only morally the more corrupt; 


MORALITY—WHAT IS IT? 5 


and to be self-conscious may be only to be self-centered. 
To know what you are doing, or to act knowingly, is doubt- 
less a necessary condition of morality—since morality can- 
not be predicated of such things as rivers, volcanoes, or 
motor-cars; but to identify morality with this condition is 
to define it negatively and insufficiently. Positively de- 
fined, it is not enough to act knowingly, one must also do 
what is right. 

What is right! ‘This suggests a set of terms wholly 
foreign to those which I have used in the answer given 
above. What is it now to be moral? In this vocabulary the 
answer would be, to be faithful to your duty; to obey the 
moral law; to conform to the approved standards; which are 
securely based upon fundamental and eternal principles. 
By placing the two sets of terms side by side—on the one 
side, right, duty, law, standard, principle, and on the other, 
knowledge, intelligence, thoughtfulness—we may see, in the 
contrast of implications, the general character of the issue. 

I may state the issue more formally by distinguishing 
two classes of ethical theories: absolutistic, or authoritarian 
theories, in which morality is based upon authority, or law, 
assumed to be superior to and binding upon human choice; 
and what I shall call humanistic, or libertarian theories, 
in which morality is derived from human nature and human 
choice. Stoicism marks the direction of absolutistic theor- 
ies, Epicureanism of humanistic. My own view I will 
describe as humanistic, though I shall also state its implica- 
tions in other terms. And I shall freely refer to the 
authoritarian view as the “‘orthodox”’ view, not for the sake 
of the epithet which this term has become, but because, as a 
matter of sober terminology and of etymology, it is the word 


6 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


best fitted to indicate the view of those who conceive intel- 
ligence to consist in “right thinking” and morality to be “a 
question of right and wrong”’. 

This enables me to add a further point of definition to 
the motive of the essay. For, as against this orthodox 
view, I shall deny that morality is ‘‘a question of right and 
wrong” and also that intelligence consists in “right think- 
ing’. The word that I shall use as best marking the mean- 
ing of both is “criticism”. And what I will present is a 
“critical” philosophy of life. ‘To define this word is of 
course the task of chapters to come. But the nature of the 
question may be suggested by pointing to the difference of 
attitude represented by ‘the moralist”’, traditionally con- 
ceived as stern, forbidding, and exclusive in his judgments, 
and by “‘the critic’, 7. e., the critic of art and literature, sup- 
posed to represent a genial catholicity of taste. The critic 
may by chance indeed be also a “moralist”’, intent upon 
establishing standards of orthodoxy in the field of criticism. 
The typically “pure” critic, however, is commonly little in- 
terested in questions of orthodoxy. His mind is working 
upon a very different question: not whether the object of 
his criticism, novel, poem, picture, or symphony, is in any 
sense “right” or “wrong”’, orthodox or heterodox, but is it 
interesting? Is it worth while? Is there anything in it? 
And what he means is, Is there any meaning in it? This 
novel, this picture, this poem, this song—is it a merely con- 
ventional echo of tones, colors, words, or is it the immediate 
utterance of individual experience and thought? And if 
there be a meaning in it, the only thing interesting is to 
understand that meaning. Such, as I conceive, is the at- 
titude of the critic of literature and art; and such likewise, 
in opposition to the orthodox distinction of right and wrong, 


MORALITY—W HAT IS IT? 7 


I take to be the attitude of any genuine inquiry concerning 
morality. 

It may also help to define the issue if I point to the 
difference in theories of the state (where indeed, as Plato 
truly observes, we find ethics ‘‘writ large’) corresponding 
to the divergence of ethical theory; to the difference, 
namely, between the absolutistic theory, embodied in the 
popular conception of ‘“‘the German state’, and the theories 
variously described as liberal, democratic, or individ- 
ualistic. The latter might be called the humanistic theories 
of the state. And also the critical theories; as teaching 
that political life and virtue consist less in obedience to 
law than in popular criticism. 

In the literature of moral philosophy these two classes 
of theory may be said to represent respectively two motifs, 
corresponding to two traditional elements of the moral 
problem. On the one hand it seems that morality is the 
fulfilment of an obligation (in the traditional literature 
of ethics “moral” and “obligation” are the two words most 
often conjoined); on the other hand it seems that moral 
action must be freely chosen action. The difficulty is 
then to see how it can be both. We seem to be faced with 
an antinomy. We warn the moral agent that he must 
fulfil his obligations—just because they are binding; and 
then we add that he must freely choose to fulfil them—as 
if they were not binding. Faced with this difficulty, the 
absolutistic theories tend to stress the obligation and let the 
freedom come in where and how it can—perhaps only in 
a Pickwickian sense. The humanistic theories lay stress 
upon the freedom. They may offer a Pickwickian defini- 
tion of obligation, or, in anarchistic fashion, repudiate 
it altogether. 


8 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


I would not make light of obligation. Rather would I 
say that he who wants anything is thus far obliged; and 
that he who loves is in loyalty bound. The conception of 
obligation that I shall dispute is the following. Author- 
jtarian moralists, seeking a secure anchorage for the con- 
ception of obligation, are accustomed to fasten it to some 
conception of absolute power or supreme authority, such 
as the will of God, the sovereignty of the state, the para- 
mount interests of society, or possibly, in these latter days, 
the biological laws of nature. This authority, whatever it 
be, is assumed to be morally prior to that of the choices and 
judgments of individual men and to furnish the criterion 
by which to measure the moral validity of these judgments. 
My conception of morality rejects all such moral absolutes. 
A morality thus based upon authority does not differ in 
principle, I should say, from the old-fashioned morality 
of hell-fire. This does not require me to deny the exist- 
ence of God—not any more than to deny the existence of 
society. Nor does it commit me to an especially ‘“‘worldly” 
view of life. What I dispute is the relevance of “au- 
thority”. If authority be the basis of morality, the latter 
term might as well be abandoned. For its “right” is no 
longer distinguishable from might. 


CHAPTER II 
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 


§ 3. The orthodox moralist. §4. The moralist as a naturalist. 
§ 5. Moral insight. 


EFINITIONS of ethics, or discussions of the 
L) meaning and function of ethics, are supposed to 

be (as they often are) as remote from a productive 
analysis of morality as surveying is from farming; the idea 
being that it is one thing to plot the field of ethics and quite 
another thing to say what the field will produce. It is upon 
the contrary assumption, namely, that a conception of ethics 
is in itself a description of morality, that I venture to open 
the discussion with a chapter on the study of ethics and the 
moral philosopher. 

As a formal definition of ethics (to stand in the back- 
ground) I will propose the following. Morality has been 
defined as the self-conscious living of life. The study of 
morality, or ethics, may then be defined as a study of the 
meaning and value of life. Or, since the study of morality 
is ever the discussion of a problem, ethics may be defined 
as a study of the problem of life. Or again—and this is 
the aspect of the subject to be emphasized here—as a study 
of the varieties of life and their individual significance. 

Such a conception of ethics may at first glance seem so 
broad as to be meaningless. Yet any narrower conception 
fails, it seems to me, to reveal the full significance of the 


subject or to explain why the discussion of moral problems 
9 


10 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


should be, as it always is, a matter of absorbing interest to 
every more thoughtful man. The development of the 
conception will occupy all of the chapters to come. In this 
chapter I shall indicate its tendency by contrasting it with 
the orthodox conception of ethics as represented by the 
orthodox moralist. 


§ 3 


What does ‘‘the man on the street” understand by ethics? 
Or, if I may choose a spokesman nearer home, what is the 
conception of ethics in the mind of the average undergrad- 
uate who has just registered his name for the next term’s 
course? Something like this, I venture. Ethics, as he 
understands it, is “‘a study of right conduct”. The purpose 
of the course in ethics is to teach the student ‘‘what is right’. 
This means, in the first place, that he expects to derive from 
the course an exposition of the established principles of 
morality; principles hardly less established than the 
principles of physics or the principles of law, and hardly 
less supported by authority. And then from these princi- 
ples he expects to derive, or to have authoritatively derived 
for him, a compendium of rules, a guide to life, which will 
once for all mark out for him the (straight and narrow) 
path of duty. Further perhaps, he expects to receive expert 
solutions of certain nice questions, such as, Is a lie ever 
justifiable? though he is not quite prepared to substitute 
the expert solution for his own common sense. 

But what he also expects, perhaps above all, is that the 
teacher will ‘‘exercise a moral influence’, and that his 
teaching will also be preaching. He is to “speak as one 
having authority”. If the tone of authority be missing the 
pupil will suspect the morality. Nay, I have known pupils 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 11 


who would authoritatively instruct their teacher in this mat- 
ter. I come here to be influenced, their attitude has seemed 
to say, and now I find the responsibility imposed upon 
me. I come for sound doctrine, and I get problems. In 
other words, I come for edification, and I am compelled to 
think. 

There is a curious difference between ethics and other 
subjects in the college curriculum. The teacher of other 
subjects is bound to enlighten his pupils but he is under no 
obligation to convert. The teacher of ethics must not only 
convert, he appears to be authorized to mould the character 
of his pupils. And for the matter of that, after the pattern 
of his own, which is to serve as an example. And what is 
more, the average pupil, by no means in this respect a 
refractory pupil, expects his character to be moulded. 
And further, he will impose this as an obligation, and 
bestow the authority, upon any other persons, including 
his fellow-students, who set out to be moral. In their 
view the moral is inseparable from the didactic. As a 
further point of difference I may remark that while pro- 
fessors in other subjects are crowned for discoveries, dis- 
coveries in the field of ethics are more likely to be damned. 

Such are the implications of the definition which makes 
ethics a study of right conduct. As a study of right con- 
duct the ethics thus defined is what I have called orthodox 
ethics, in the sense that it conceives of morality in terms of 
right and wrong. ‘This view of ethics is by no means con- 
fined to the man on the street. The man on the street is 
only adopting the traditional assumption of the schools. 
For widely as these may differ with regard to the ethical 
motive and the spiritual quality of the ideally good man 
(of which something will be said in the next chapter), 


12 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


there seems to be on the part of each school an attempt 
to show that, in the end, in terms of practical conduct, 
its own good man will satisfy the requirements of the 
orthodox standard. As J. S. Mill will show, the utilitarian 
is in practice as orthodoxly moral as any Kantian rationalist 
or any intuitionist. Their motives may differ, their prac- 
tice is the same. So that it seems plausible to say, with 
Wundt and Leslie Stephen, that men agree generally as to 
what is moral and differ only as to wy it is so; and there- 
fore that the only function of ethics is to find the reasons 
for what we already know to be right. 


§ 4 


As against this orthodox conception, I propose now to 
offer, not so much a definition of ethics (the ending of the 
term suggests a “science”, and it is my purpose to show 
that there is no such science) as a conception of moral 
philosophy; and less perhaps a conception than a picture of 
the moral philosopher, or the moralist. The moralist I 
will present as a naturalist who studies, not conduct, but 
persons. 

To make the motif of this clearer I will repeat the query 
put to me several years ago by a clever and quick-witted 
woman; a thoroughly humane and cultivated person, who, 
however, as a trained and zealous student of nature, was 
disposed to take the point of view of natural science on its 
own word as the final criterion of wisdom and of truth. 
From previous conversations I had guessed that she found 
the profession of philosophy rather amusing if also some- 
what mystifying. Finally came the question: in a world 
so full and various with fascinating things, such as glaciers, 
sea-anemones, and (I forget her third item, but I will in- 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER is 


sert) shovel-headed sharks, how could any really live 
person be interested in the abstractions of philosophy? 

I will admit that the question floored me. It was a 
question which (after twenty years of teaching philosophy) 
my Freudian subconscious self preferred not to have 
raised. ‘Though never a collector myself, and having: only 
the slightest interest in the difference between one rock, 
one bird, one leaf, or one tree, and another, I had none the 
less envied the naturalist, or natural scientist, with his 
collections and his museums. If he were asked what he 
was doing in the world he had always something to show 
for it. He could entertain his friends with items of in- 
terest which normal persons could understand and ap- 
preciate. JI could entertain mine only with—‘‘abstrac- 
tions’. What in the world, then, is the philosopher really 
studying? 

The answer, which came to me only long afterward, I 
have suggested above: the philosopher studies persons. i! 
am not here proposing an academic definition of philosophy 
—or at best only one more. It will be sufficient to suggest 
that all the distinctively philosophical problems—the prob- 
lems of logic, of psychology, of ethics, of the theory of 
knowledge, and no less of metaphysics—arise from the fact 
that there are persons in the world. With no persons in 
the world there would be no problems for philosophy but 
only problems for science, to be solved neatly and surely 
by scientific method. Hence the scientist would prefer to 
ignore the fact of persons, or at any rate to leave it out 
of his calculation. As a “modern scientist’’ in particular, 
he claims to treat the world impersonally; that is to say, 
to observe and report the objective facts in the world before 
him and to say nothing of the fact that it is he who ob- 


14 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


serves them. This, he insists, has nothing to do with the 
facts observed. 

The philosopher suspects the contrary. He, therefore, 
will study, not only the world, but also, and particularly, 
the scientist himself, the knowing person. And when he 
considers the knowing person in connection with the world 
known, what strikes him most forcibly is that, while the 
world known is for science supposedly one, the knowing 
persons are many and various even within the camp of 
scientists. And the supposedly impersonal and scientific 
view of the world is only one among others. ‘This variety 
and multiplicity of personal view is grievous to the scientist, 
since it lies in the way of a calm acceptance of scientific 
authority. But the true philosopher delights in it. 

Thus it comes about that the more reflective philosopher 
loves best to study philosophy itself in the form of the 
history of philosophy; in which the variety of human 
motive is seen in its most reflective form. For him the 
history of philosophy is the study of philosophy par ex- 
cellence. ‘The scientist, on the other hand, is comparatively 
little interested in the history of science. The history of 
science is not science but only gossip about science—anti- 
quarian and polite. From the scientific point of view the 
persons composing the scientific world are of no impor- 
tance. ‘Their personal motives and experiences have noth- 
ing to do with the facts which it is their duty to discover. 
What is important is the fact itself; and when the fact is 
established the discoverer may well be forgotten. Such is 
the point of view of science in contrast to the point of view 
of philosophy. 

Now ethics, or moral philosophy, is most of all a study 
of persons. I shall not pause here to specify in what 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 15 


manner or degree ethics differs from psychology and each 
again from the broader study of philosophy. What I 
would point out (in answer to the inquiry of my naturalistic 
friend) is that the moralist is also a naturalist. He too, 
if you please, is a collector of specimens. Only, his speci- 
mens are persons and their points of view. They cannot, 
unfortunately, be preserved in jars; they must be stored 
less securely in the mind of the collector. But if it still 
be suggested that he is “playing with abstractions”, then 
I shall ask to be introduced to something really concrete. 
And as for the interest of the collection—I do not doubt 
that glaciers and sea-anemones are stimulating to an in- 
telligent imagination, but what may be claimed for them 
I claim a fortiori for persons. Indeed I cherish the 
prejudice that the interest in persons stands for a somewhat 
nicer taste. 

The true moralist is collecting whenever he is awake. 
And not merely such items as the Ten Commandments, the 
Code of Hammurabi, the Categorical Imperative, and the 
Golden Sayings of Marcus Aurelius. These serve mainly 
as tags for his collection. His choicest bits are those per- 
sonal idiosyncracies, tricks of manner and speech, and 
personal weaknesses (which the moralist mindful of the 
code of his profession will always hesitate to treat as weak- 
nesses) which all unwittingly reveal the personal point of 
view. When Bishop Butler speaks of God as “‘the Lord 
and Proprietor of the universe’, I see at once his concep- 
tion of moral authority: God is for him an English 
landed-gentlemen. Hence the moralist’s choicest field is 
where truly well-bred persons never venture—the field of 
gossip. When Mrs. Jones tells him what Mrs. Brown said 
to Mrs. Smith and what Mrs. Smith said in reply, and 


16 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


then adds confidentially her own opinion of both, the moral- 
ist notes the presence of three interesting points of view (not 
forgetting that of Mrs. Jones) whose differences and mutual 
relations he deems worthy of respectful analysis. And 
nothing delights him more than a conversation between two 
persons of whom neither grasps what the other has in mind. 
One of my most instructive specimens of this kind is a con- 
versation between a Hindoo gentleman and a Christian 
lady, each of whom found in the other a true type of 
“heathen”. The exasperated Hindoo gentleman guessed 
very well how he was being regarded, but the Christian 
lady remained blissfully unconscious. She had no inkling 
of the horror aroused in her auditor by her frequent refer- 
ences to “the precious blood of Christ”. “In India’, he 
assured me very earnestly afterwards, “it has been thou- 
sands of years since we have believed in human sacrifice.” 

Such may be said to constitute the moralist’s private 
collection. For his professional collection he must explore 
the world. And to some extent literally; for I fancy that 
only a residence for some time in a foreign country can 
enable one fully to appreciate how differences of custom 
and ways of living, apparently superficial, stand for 
deeper and genuinely moral differences of outlook upon 
life. As a retired scholar and thinker, however, his chief 
field of exploration must be the field of culture—of litera- 
ture and art—made accessible to him through the medium 
of libraries and museums. Here of course his most im- 
portant specimens are his fellow-moralists, especially those 
preserved in the history of moral philosophy—such as 
Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics, Spinoza, Hobbes, 
Shaftesbury and Bishop Butler, Hume, the two Mills and 
Herbert Spencer, Kant and T. H. Green, Schopenhauer 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER i! 


and Nietzsche. For among his points of view these are 
perhaps the most articulately ethical. Yet it is after all 
the intensely personal character of these moral philosophies 
that makes them significant. Had Spinoza really suc- 
ceeded in demonstrating morality geometrically none of us 
would take the trouble to read him. 

Important again for the moralist are the literatures of 
history and anthropology, especially of those anthropol- 
ogists who with sympathetic imagination have not for- 
gotten that they were studying human beings. A rich field 
for his purpose is the field of literary criticism. ‘There 
he will find a valuable collection of points of view already 
“prepared” for him by the literary critic; whose criticism, 
as I shall point out later, is fundamentally moral criticism. 
But an indispensable field of research for the moralist of 
the present day is the field of serious fiction. Nowhere 
else will he find such a variety of person and motive or a 
form of literature which more inevitably reveals the per- 
ceptive capacities of its creators—for though the characters 
be fictitious (I fancy they are never quite so) the writer 
is sure to be real. I have heard of moralists who never 
read novels. I wonder how they could expect to have 
much to say on the subject of morality. 

Such is the naturalistic moralist. For him it takes all 
kinds of men to make a moral world, and the more kinds 
the better. Orthodox morality admits only one kind, and 
that the right kind. 


§ 5 


I will now anticipate some of the consequences of this 
view in the form of answers to a few of the more obvious 
questions. 


18 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


The first is more likely to be an accusation. And so, 
I shall be told, what you mean by morality is “the ethics 
of naturalism”! To this I reply that in the common ac- 
ceptation, in which naturalism is opposed to idealism 
(and is perhaps a euphemism for materialism), naturalism 
is just the reverse of what I mean by morality. In this 
acceptation I prefer to identify morality with super- 
naturalism. I have drawn the moralist as a naturalist 
because I wish to insist upon his empirical and naturalistic 
preoccupation with concrete individuals, 7. e., with persons. 
But I might well have drawn him, after the fashion of 
Shaftesbury and Butler, as “‘a student of human nature”. 
In these terms I may best put the answer to the question. 

For between the study of nature and the study of human 
nature there lies an important difference. The student of 
nature may contemplate his specimens lovingly and indulge 
in curious speculations about the play of forces which has 
made them what they are, but he hardly ventures—not if 
he be a strictly scientific student of nature—to ask how it 
would seem to be a glacier, a sea-anemone, or a shovel- 
headed shark. ‘The sea-anemone is a living thing; what, 
then, is its attitude towards life? Orthodox science 
discourages such questions and he who values his posi- 
tion in scientific society is careful not to suggest them. Let 
us, says the scientist drily, stick to the facts. Now it 
is precisely this forbidden kind of question that is upper- 
most in the mind of the naturalistic moralist; and it is 
precisely this power of sympathetic imagination—the 
power of seeing others as they see themselves and our- 
selves as others see us—that measures one’s capacity as a 
moralist and also constitutes one’s own morality. This 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 19 


comprehension of motives is what is commonly, but very 
accurately and significantly, called ‘“‘moral insight’. 

A consideration of the meaning of moral insight will 
help also to answer our next question. For I may be 
asked whether the attitude which I have described as 
“naturalistic” does not involve a coolly supercilious and 
self-conceited treatment of one’s fellows as ‘“‘specimens’’, 
and thus an immoral attitude in the moralist himself. 
Not, I should reply, in one who studies them with moral 
insight. The factor of moral insight introduces into the 
relations between the student of human nature and the 
object of his study exceedingly perplexing questions. I 
am inclined to say indeed that he who can explain just 
how I know my neighbor will have answered the last 
question in metaphysics. ‘Thus much, however, seems 
clear: one who studies the ways and points of view of men 
comprehendingly can hardly be coolly supercilious, much 
less self-conceited, however naturalistic and critical. 
There is no incompatibility between the critical attitude 
and personal interest and affection. It may even be said 
that each implies the other and that those whom we ques- 
tion most curiously we love most warmly. Nor between 
personal affection and a sense of humor. We love the little 
children just in the fact that they delight and amuse us. 
And as for the “bitter humor” with which we annihilate 
an enemy—this seems to contain an element of paradox. 
For to make it effective, and really annihilating, it seems 
necessary first to control and cool, perhaps also to conceal, 
the bitterness; while if you really loathe the person in 
question you may fear to condescend to humor. Humor 
is too compromising. 


20 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


In any case it seems that the study of man introduces 
considerations hardly contemplated in the study of nature. 
The sea-anemone, however curious and beautiful, is dis- 
posed of when he is described and named. He has nothing 
to say in reply. To stamp your fellow’s point of view— 
as “oriental”, for example—is only to learn that the 
oriental view has something to say about the meaning of 
life for you and me. Hence for those who choose study 
as a reposeful avocation it is wiser to study sea-anemones 
than to study men. 

The next question is more technical. Naturalistic 
ethics, it will be asked,—what is this but plain psychology? 
In other words, if the moralist is the ‘‘student of human 
nature” why not call him a psychologist? My instinctive 
reply would be that I don’t care what you name him. 
For I greatly suspect that these distinctions of disciplines 
—between ethics and psychology, ethics and politics, ethics 
and economics, psychology and logic, psychology and phi- 
losophy, logic and epistemology, etc., etc—without a 
laborious chapter on which no Teutonic treatise can get 
under way—are but so many legal fictions, or academic 
fences, set up by each professor to prevent a neighboring 
professor from borrowing his chair. But since a failure 
to answer might leave an ambiguity I will put it thus: 
I am quite ready to abandon the distinction between psy- 
chology and moral philosophy (but not to allow moral 
philosophy to be “reduced” to psychology), if only the 
psychologist will assume the responsibility of cultivating 
moral insight and undertake to use it as a method of psy- 
chology. ‘The offer is not likely to be accepted. 

Stated more formally, the issue is as follows. The 
traditional distinction between psychology and ethics is 


TE O eA sPrHL 17O.S' O.P AE R ab 


that, while both are (say) studies of men, psychology 
studies a man for what he is, ethics for what he ought to 
be. But now, what do you mean by what a man is? 
What a sea-anemone is, it seems that we can state clearly 
enough; since we are careful not to endow the sea- 
anemone with imagination. Hence it is just what it is, a 
determinate present fact and nothing more. But when we 
ask what a man is we discover (if we use moral insight) 
that he never is just what he is as a present determinate 
fact. Every man not absolutely dead is endowed with 
some imagination; and this means that what he does now 
and what he is now, is guided more or less by what he 
judges it worth while to do and worth while to be, i. e., 
by what he is trying to be and ought to be. And thus the 
“is” and the “ought to be’, the psychological and the 
moral, are so vitally connected that neither can even be 
stated apart from the other. 

I may put the point differently by saying that, in con- 
trast to the sea-anemone, the man more or less knows what 
he is; and this knowing ought to be a vital part of the 
man for any study that calls itself “psychology”. Say, 
then, that A is a liar; and add to this that A knows that he 
is a liar. What is A now? What is a liar who knows 
that he is a liar? Or (in terms of “fact”) what can you 
predict of him when he finds out and ‘‘comes to himself’’? 
This is precisely what no one knows, least of all the 
scientific psychologist. And this is precisely the moral 
fact, an indeterminate sort of fact which does not readily 
meet the requirements of fact. 

In the light of this we can see perhaps why what is now 
called psychology was numbered a few generations ago 
among “‘the moral sciences”, and why this phrase was used 


22 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


then to cover all those studies of man, or of human nature, 
which we now call, less aptly, as it seems to me, “the 
social sciences”. And on the other hand it is doubtless a 
realization of the indeterminately “moral” quality of the 
conscious fact that has led the more advanced of scientific 
psychologists to abandon ‘‘psychology” and content them- 
selves with a description of human “behavior”. The new 
science of behaviorism will treat the man precisely as we 
treat the sea-anemone, the assumption being that there is 
as little imagination, or of “trying to be”, in one case as 
in the other. 

Finally it may be objected that the naturalistic preoccu- 
pation with the variety of human nature tends to blur the 
distinction of good and bad and to make any man as good 
as any other. But hardly, I might reply, if morality is 
to be identified with the intelligent, or critical, life—unless 
indeed we are to assume that all men are equally intelli- 
gent. Yet this will still mean that the intelligence of each 
is to be judged according to what he in particular is trying 
to do, according to his particular conception of life, or 
kind of human nature; and as for the kinds of human 
nature, none is better than another. Such is my answer. 
But I must confess that the question of who is the better 
man does not now strongly appeal to me and I even sus- 
pect it to be immoral. Why should one wish to know? 
I doubt if my reader would care to admit even to him- 
self that it is any part of his interest in morality to learn 
to which and to how many of his fellows he is entitled to 
say, “I am holier than thou.”’ Nor could he feel it less 
incumbent upon him to be all that he ought to be because 
he is already better than some of his fellows. It may be 


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 23 


very important from a practical standpoint to ask who is 
the better carpenter, the better physician, the better man of 


business, but this is not to ask who is morally the better 
man, 


CHAPTER III 
THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 


§ 6. Orthodox morality and the moral standard. §7. The moral-: 
ities of race, class, and occupation. § 8. Differing moral tastes. 
§ 9. The good men of the moral philosophies. 


8 6 


HE orthodox moralist is commonly to be identified 
in social intercourse by the extent to which he talks 
about standards; in moral philosophy by his ex- 

tended discussion of ‘“‘the moral standard”. He is the 
man, very frequently to be found among academic men, 
who refuses to listen to any moral observation of yours 
without first asking you, ‘“What is your standard?” who 
insists that, as the primary condition of morality, ‘what 
we need is standards’; who deplores ‘‘the decay of stand- 
ards’; and whose definitive moral condemnation is, ‘“They 
have no standards’. It is not always easy to make out 
whether this attitude is one of conviction or of scepticism, 
since at times it seems that any standard will do provided 
it be a standard. But the usual implication is that there 
is but one standard of morality for all right-thinking men, 
the nature of which will be obvious to all who sincerely 
look for it. 

This attitude sat attractively enough upon the resident 
of a small community of a few generations ago, when most 
communities were small and travel was difficult. In that 


setting it may be regarded as picturesque. This old- 
: 24 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 25 


fashioned citizen had little consciousness, or at least little 
comprehension, of any culture but his own; and from the 
point of view of his own experience of the world the dis- 
tinction between the heathen and the people of God 
seemed obvious and rational; as deeply grounded in the 
nature of things as for Plato and Aristotle the superiority 
of Greek to barbarian, of man to woman, and of freeman 
toslave. The situation is different today. The confluence 
of peoples and of ideas may very well be a confusion 
of tongues. Even so we meet face to face, and thought 
to thought, too many different kinds of men to rest com- 
fortably in the conviction that our own is the right kind. 
And too many standards are suggested for the integrity 
of ‘the moral standard’. All, it seems, are moral stand- 
ards. It is then no longer picturesque to assume a 
common standard for all “‘right-thinking men”. 


§7 


What we learn, however, from the difference of stand- 
ard, and precisely from each one’s belief in the exclusive 
validity of his own, is that the differences are moral dif- 
ferences. This is very obviously true of the differences of 
nation and race. Instinctively we tend to look upon thé 
foreigner as immoral. “An immoral foreigner” seems/a 
natural conjunction of terms. It is not merely that he is 
strange; an important part of his strangeness is that, to 
us, he is lacking in moral perception. An elderly and 
kind-hearted English lady once said to me, quite without 
arrogance, that in her opinion God had created the 
British people for the special task of bringing Christianity 
and salvation to the world—this was said, by the way, in 
Germany many years before the War. Mr. Punch may 


26 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


classify her with his other old lady who complained that 
daylight-saving deprived her begonias of the morning sun. 
But in point of fact few Englishmen, perhaps few Ameri- 
cans, can believe that a Frenchman is quite able to grasp 
the meaning of “sound morality”. Few Anglo-Saxons can 
attribute full moral perception to a Jew—except as he is 
allowed to be different from other Jews. The Anglo- 
Saxon cultivates an ideal of dignity and reserve. To him 
the Jew seems ingratiating and expansive. The Jew, it 
might be said, seeks to be on terms of personal confidence 
with his fellows, and thus he desires to please. It hardly 
occurs to the Anglo-Saxon to ask whether this desire to 
please may not be the expression of a moral ideal; nor, on 
the other hand, does he very carefully examine the moral 
quality of his own cherished attitude of “reserve”. He is 
content to attribute the Semitic attitude to the want of a 
proper—in the last analysis, morally proper—dignity. 
The Russians present a nice problem for right-thinking 
moralists. In a few generations past they have contributed 
most of what is great to European music and fiction. In 
the presence of Tschaikowsky, Tourgenieff, Tolstoi, and 
Dostoievsky, it is not easy to dismiss them as simple bar- 
barians. Yet as depicted by their novelists, even excluding 
such as Dostoievsky, they are a strange people. At one 
moment they astonish us by the depth and tenderness of 
their spiritual insight; at the next by the profundity of their 
reflections upon life; in the next moment we find them in a 
whirl of violence and dissipation or else prostrate with a 
devastating cynicism. They seem to be both more sophisti- 
cated than we are and more naive. Is there a key to their 
inconsequentiality? To any naturalistic moralist they pre- 
sent a fascinating problem. The orthodox moralist prefers 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS rl 


to set them down as sentimentalists and romanticists, i. e., 
as morally defective. 

Yet the Russians present a problem because we are in 
contact with their literature. There are other races, such as 
the Chinese, which apparently present none. Their bland 
indifference to western ideals of progress is easily set down 
to ignorance and “backwardness”. We know indeed, 
vaguely and abstractly, that the Chinese is an ancient civili- 
zation, which is marked by a coherent social order, by a 
high development of the fine arts and a marvellous skill 
in the mechanical arts, and by an elaborate tradition of 
manners and morals. But only a few are in a position to 
know this concretely. Hence we cheerfully take up “‘the 
white man’s burden” of teaching the Chinese our civiliza- 
tion, and possibly of enforcing it upon them. ‘The white 
man’s burden” is perhaps the most naive expression of 
orthodox morality and for that reason the most instructive. 
What it presupposes is a classification of all races and 
peoples as morally superior or inferior according to one 
conception of morality and one scheme of civilization, 
namely, our own. 

Such of course are only the commonplaces of the tradi- 
tional moralist. It is worth noting, by the way, that “the 
moralist” of the older tradition, as distinct from the more 
modern teacher of scientific ethics, was inclined to be mildly 
sceptical about the final rightness of any accepted standard. 
Yet I wonder if we have fully grasped the questions raised 
by his naturalistic survey. If the Chinese are to advance 
in civilization does it mean that they are to adopt western 
ideas? Has the Japanese adoption of western ideas been 
truly and purely an advance in civilization? It may be 
that we have much to teach the Chinese but would a China- 


28 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


man be better or worse if he became an Englishman or an 
American? And coming nearer home, if our American 
negro-laborer, or waiter, became a gentleman, and the cul- 
tural equal of the white gentleman whom he serves, would 
this mean that in becoming a gentleman (assuming that the 
ideal of the gentleman is a moral ideal) he also became 
white? If so it seems that we ought to commend him for 
“‘aping the whites”’. 

Besides the race-moralities there are class-moralities. 
And these class-moralities, unobservant of the class- 
element, will then purport each to stand for morality as 
such. Our European moral code is supposed to be mainly 
Christian, but our moral philosophy—the traditional ethics 
of the schools—is clearly an inheritance from the Greeks, 
Plato’s “Republic” and Aristotle’s “Ethics” constituting 
its most classical documents. Now the Greek ethics, of 
whatever school, was an aristocratic ethics. The Greek 
conception of the good man and the good life was derived 
from the point of view of a leisure class, the point of view 
of the working population remaining inarticulate. Plato, 
the best Greek representative, by the way, of the principle 
of rightness, treats his artisans as if they were hardly worth 
consulting. Aristotle tells us unhesitatingly that one can- 
not realize the moral ideal without an independent income 
and he also upholds slavery as a natural institution. 

To modern ideas this limitation of virtue to a favored 
class is both repellent and absurd. Yet we are not ready 
to abandon the Greek conception of the best and most 
virtuous life. To us as to Aristotle it seems that the life 
of a gentleman, with its implications of leisure and culture, 
is the best life; only we should like to interpret it liberally, 
without the invidious class-distinction, and without ref- 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 29 


erence to a qualification based upon property. It is along 
this line that T. H. Green conceives the social ideal to be a 
society in which all men are gentlemen, in which, however, 
the mark of a gentleman is not a matter of externals. 
But this is only to raise the question, Can the idea of a 
gentleman be made independent of external conditions? 
When we admit that the one-room tenement of the poorest 
classes makes decency of living almost impossible (in- 
cluding specifically moral decency) it seems that we have 
admitted Aristotle’s view. And if we carry the notion of 
decency further to the point where it issues in the concep- 
tion of culture and refinement (and if this be not a moral 
conception, what is it?), we shall find it difficult to disen- 
tangle our idea of the good life from an order of things 
which involves class-distinctions and servants. For my 
own part, although I dislike the institution of servants, 
and find no one more amusing than him who bases his 
claims to gentility upon knowing “‘the proper tone” in which 
to address a servant, yet I find it difficult to see just how 
that man or woman of spiritual refinement who most ap- 
peals to me could be bred without some measure of this 
background of service and leisure. And leisure not based 
upon service seems at least remote. 

The class-element in this conception of the good life is 
pointed out by Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist, in his 
book on ‘Les Illusions du Progrés’. Sorel makes it 
indeed a ground for complaint that all ideas of progress, 
those of social reformers among others, have implied that 
the proletariat was to take on the culture and the manners 
of the leisure classes. To the claim that this leisure- 
class culture stands for superior intelligence he replies by 
showing that in France, at any rate, philosophy and lit- 


30 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


erature have been designed for the diversion of an idle 
and restless court society and have therefore carefully 
avoided coming to terms with existing social conditions.* 
Of such intelligence the eighteenth-century abbé, clever, 
witty, and sceptical, is the representative type. But with 
this in mind it may then occur to us to ask whether the 
moral philosophy of the schools is not the product of a 
leisure-loving class of academicians whose leisure requires 
the support of wealth and power. This indeed is inevita- 
bly true even though we attach the best significance to 
“Jeisure’—and to my mind leisure is indispensable to any 
true life. And then we may go further and point out that 
not only our moral philosophy but the greater part of our 
science and scholarship is the work of men whose profes- 
sion is teaching and whose conception of the intelligible 
is therefore likely to be influenced by what may be prac- 
tically taught and in particular by what is available for 
examination. My belief is that this will prove to be a 
fruitful consideration for the student of logic. Its bear- 
ing upon the logic of orthodox ethics I will point out in 
the next chapter. Sorel, however, will have none of this 
leisure-class culture. It is the task of his syndicalism to 
destroy not only the leisure class but the class-ideal; and 
the proletariat is then to set up its own conception of the 
good life. What the proletarian good life will be like, 
we are not told. It seems that, even more resolutely than 
other class-ideals, it is to be enforced upon the unwilling; 
only it will not pretend to be other than a class-ideal. 
Those who believe that virtue is eternally one should 


1 According to Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, Vol. I, Chapter XII, it is this 
motive that marks the difference between Helvetius and Bentham, whose ethical 
theories are virtually identical. Bentham, however, was a social reformer, Hel- 
vetius a social satirist. 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 31 


reflect further that, quite apart from the social and eco- 
nomic distinctions of class, moral ideals vary with the 
special conditions of life, and especially with occupation. 
The qualities of character demanded of a locomotive 
engineer or of the captain of a ship we hardly expect of 
the poet and scholar. These qualities are not in the poet’s 
line. The parsimony, or meanness, which Aristotle 
rightly excludes from his magnanimous man may rank as 
a virtue in the poor clerk or laborer with a family to sup- 
port. Yet each is disposed to set up his own standard 
of virtue as a universal moral ideal. The man in easy cir- 
cumstances tends to be disgusted by the meticulous economy 
of his less fortunate neighbor and to call it sordid. On 
the other hand the man to whom the great problem of life 
is the problem of economic respectability—the problem 
of paying his own way and owing no man anything—is 
disposed to look upon all the more liberal forms of life 
as somewhat frivolous, incompatible with genuine moral 
seriousness; just as for the man who works with his hands 
it requires some imagination to conceive that those whose 
work is chiefly mental render any real service to society. 
Consider, again, the virtue of courage. This we are 
likely to prescribe as an indispensable virtue—at least 
for the male sex—without reflecting that it is mainly of 
military origin. Even “moral courage” betrays militant 
implications when we reflect that its effective exercise calls 
for a certain aggressiveness, a certain delight in conflict, 
and a corresponding indifference to giving offence. In 
the last generation or two this originally chivalrous tradi- 
tion has been reinforced by the biological view of life, with 
its doctrine of the struggle for existence and the survival 
of the fittest, with the result that athleticism has become 


OL MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


the dominant type of virtue, and praise is bestowed upon 
the ‘“‘red-blooded man”’; while a corresponding stigma rests 
upon the man of gentler tastes, or the ‘“‘effeminate’’ man, 
now demonstrated to be a moral defective. For my own 
part, I find it somewhat difficult to conceive how a red- 
blooded man can be capable of appreciating the finer and 
more humane sides of life; while I find a willing admira- 
tion of ‘‘moral’’ courage embarrassed by the fact that moral 
courage is so much easier for him who can see only one 
side of the case. And I seem to have known one or two 
effeminate men who could justly be described as the salt 
of the earth. But the fact that the courageous virtues are 
described as ‘‘virile’’ (and we remember that etymologically 
“virtue” itself signifies ‘“manliness”) suggests that virtue 
may differ according to sex—unless we are to assume, as 
some sound moralists do, that men stand for a higher moral 
type than women. 


§ 8 


A little reflection upon current morality will show that 
in morality as elsewhere there are also differences of per- 
sonal taste. Our own national taste is indicated by the 
fact that the phrase “an immoral man” means, unless ex- 
pressly qualified, that the man is sexually immoral—so 
that it becomes intelligible to say, ‘““This man is a liar and 
a thief, but he is not immoral.” In view of this prevail- 
ing taste no political party cares to risk a candidate whose 
“private life” is open to attack though they will risk one 
who is known to have made a fortune out of public funds. 
In a candidate for public office it might seem that purity 
of motive in public life is more important than sexual 
purity; and as a matter of fact there are those, including 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 33 


myself, who would emphasize the former. Yet if the 
candidate for office must first of all be congenial to the 
public I do not know that either is more “right” than the 
other. 

The older moralists embodied their ‘systems’ of 
morality in tables of the cardinal, or fundamental virtues. 
Each of us tends to emphasize some one virtue as the 
cardinal virtue, which is fundamental to all of the others. 
One man prefers courage: for him everything is pardon- 
able but cowardice. Another, like myself, prefers honesty 
—honor, truthfulness, and sincerity. In his view the one 
really unpardonable sin is hypocrisy, and the one condi- 
tion to be exacted of a friend is openness and sincerity. 
A third will pardon a good deal of falsehood, disloyal 
weakness, or pecuniary irresponsibility in the man who is 
kindly and generous, always ready to do a good turn for 
his neighbor. A fourth consigns to outer darkness all 
who are not sober and prudent citizens. It seems indeed 
that most men specialize in a certain “line” of virtue as 
the standard by which they both judge others and demand 
to be judged themselves. 

Yet in judging others there are few, even among the 
believers in orthodoxy, who make no concessions to per- 
sonality, or to temperament, or to special conditions. We 
always make some allowance for ‘foreign ideas”. We do 
not so severely condemn sexual irregularity in a French- 
man or a French woman, for whom marriage is a matter 
of arrangement and requires the consent of parents, as 
we should among ourselves. And I dare say we should 
be ready to excuse polygamy in one who could show that 
polygamy was the custom of his country. Those who con- 
demn a marriage of convenience in the young may ap- 


34 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


prove of such a marriage in the middle-aged. On the 
other hand we look for more evidence of spirituality in a 
clergyman than in a layman. We do not despise the 
householder who quietly yields his goods to an armed 
burglar—we are more likely to praise him for his good 
sense—but we have only contempt for the similar 
cowardice of a policeman. And even though we assert it 
to be the solemn duty of every citizen to interest himself 
in public affairs we admit some excuse for those who are 
temperamentally retiring. Finally, it seems that we all 
make concessions to men of genius, hardly expecting from 
them that fidelity as husband and father, or that prompti- 
tude in the payment of bills, which we exact of lesser men. 
It seems that we judge them as we judge the great men of 
history, more by the claims that they make for themselves 
than by any that we would impose upon them. The uni- 
versal moral standard applies only to the common run of 
men. 


§9 


Nor will it help the argument for a moral standard to 
attribute this variable personal element in our moral es- 
timations to the unscientific character of popular judg- 
ments—on the assumption that academic ethical theory 
will reveal a unity of criterion and of method. ‘There is 
indeed a certain unity of character in academic ethics, but 
a rather dismal unity constituted by the fact that the lit- 
erature of ethics consists so largely of the discussion of 
some half dozen stock questions: such as, whether virtue 
is one or many, whether the good is perfection or happiness, 
whether the idea of obligation is analysable, whether 
benevolence can be derived from self-love, whether con- 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 35 


duct is to be judged by motive or by intention. I will not 
say that these questions are meaningless, but to my mind 
their chiefly important meaning is what they mean for the 
moralist who is dealing with them, and the chiefly creative 
result is what his discussion reveals of his personality, 
point of view, and attitude towards life. This revelation 
is the moralist’s truly important contribution to the subject- 
matter of morality. In these terms the history of ethics, 
now far from enlivening, would be a fascinating chronicle 
and a series of the nicest literary and critical problems. 
It would best be presented, not as so many “systems”, 
nor yet as so many moralists, but rather as so many ideal 
pictures, painted by the many varieties of human imagina- 
tion, each entitled, ““The Good Man”. 

And after contemplating them carefully I fancy that 
we should pronounce them all good men. I have pointed 
out that all of the good men of Greek ethics were aristo- 
crats but they were not all of one type. Plato’s good man 
is unworldly, or other-worldly; he is the poet’s ideal, the 
man of transcendent purity and refinement, partly hero 
and partly saint. Aristotle’s good man is the man of the 
world, yet the man of the world who is also a gentleman; 
the “magnanimous”, or “high-minded” man, always lib- 
eral and generous, and therefore a man of property, but 
too high-souled to make it a matter of calculation. The 
good men of the Stoics and Epicureans were neither 
worldly nor other-worldly. Neither Stoic nor Epicurean 
found much to stimulate his imagination in this world or 
the next. Hence for both the good man was the sage, 
who by achieving an independence of desire had attained 
tranquillity of mind. But while the Stoic would embody 
in his sage the idea of dignity and greatness, the Epi- 


36 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


curean sought to make him genial and humane. And thus 
the Epicurean sage bent gracefully to the adverse winds 
of life, finding tranquillity of mind in letting them take 
him where they would. The Stoic held rigidly to his 
course, the course laid by reason, and found his tranquillity 
of mind in a scornful contempt for what he suffered. 
The modern Stoic is Immanuel Kant. At first glance 
one wonders whether this rigid formalist of moral laws 
and imperatives was interested in anything human what- 
ever. Note, however, this alternative reading of his 
“categorical imperative”: ‘‘act as if the maxim of thy 
action were to become through thy will a universal law 
of nature.” Now in these days the notion of personifying 
a law of nature seems hardly stimulating. But Kant 
lived in the century thrilled by the mathematical physics 
of Newton; the century in which one could sing with 
fervor Addison’s hymn beginning with, “The spacious 
firmament on high”. All of the perplexing difficulties of 
Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” may be said to lie in 
the attempt to vindicate Newton while questioning the 
metaphysical finality of natural science. And for Kant 
the eternal and magnificent regularity of the astronomical 
system (of “the starry heavens above me’’) was a new 
revelation to the human imagination of the infinite great- 
ness of God. But the potentiality of this divine greatness 
was then also to be found in the constitution of human 
nature, in that faculty of reason, that power of controlling 
desire by the conception of law, by which men are marked 
off from the lower animals. And the specific contrast to 
this divine attribute was to be found in desire, variable 
and uncertain, which is common to men and animals. 
Accordingly, when Kant makes morality to consist in the 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 37 


suppression of desire on behalf of a single-minded re- 
gard for universal law, he will give us, not a bare formula 
devoid of human meaning, but an inspired vision of a 
transcendently noble ideal of human life. Kant’s good 
man is the man who in dignity and greatness is most akin 
to God. 

Very sordid by comparison seems the good man of the 
utilitarians—as represented, say, by Bentham and the 
elder Mill. Yet in spite of the seeming purpose of the 
utilitarian to dissolve morality into utility, his good man 
stands for an ideal genuinely moral. John Stuart Mill 
would describe the utilitarian view as an Epicurean view 
of life—because for both the end of life was “‘pleasure’’. 
But no two attitudes toward life could be much less alike. 
The Epicurean was weary and dissillusioned, and won- 
dered whether life was worth living. The utilitarian 
moralist may have the same doubts, but his good man 
never asks the question: life is here, the only question is 
then how to realize its cash-value. And no abstract dis- 
cussion of the conception of “pleasure” will give us the 
utilitarian’s meaning, for that meaning was of all ethical 
meanings the most concrete. Utilitarianism is morality 
as viewed from the point of view of modern commerce and 
modern industry—from the point of view of a commerce 
and industry which has become organized, and of a social 
class, or class of activities, which has been marked off 
and segregated, all as the result of the steam-engine. 
Utilitarianism stands, then, for a point of view hardly 
definable in terms of Greek, or perhaps of mediaeval 
culture, and for a class not previously articulate. The 
utilitarian logic is the logic of modern economics. It seeks 
to evaluate life as goods are evaluated in the market, and 


38 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


its standard “pleasure” is only the monetary standard 
(with all of its accompanying perplexities) in other terms. 

The utilitarian good man is then, whether worker or 
employer, the man whose moral ideal is economic respecta- 
bility and independence—the man who pays his way and 
owes no man anything. For him the important virtues 
are common honesty (i. e., a special sensitiveness to the 
demands of honesty where money is handled), industry, 
thrift, and sobriety. How these virtues may stand for 
moral heroism and for spiritual achievement will best be 
understood by those (not usually, by the way, persons who 
have leisure for moral philosophy) for whom the possi- 
bility of holding an insecure ‘‘job” is the lifelong alterna- 
tive to destitution. ‘These virtues are hardly to be found 
in Aristotle’s leisure-class ethics or in idealistic ethics 
generally. And it is as against this leisure-class ideal 
that we must understand the utilitarian’s special (and of 
course exclusive) claim to stand for true morality. The 
utilitarian good man recognizes his economic responsibility. 
Against this the claim of the cultivated classes would be 
that out of their leisure they have created most of what 
makes life worth living. Economically, however, they 
have been a supported class; the Greek culture in par- 
ticular rested upon a basis of slave-labor. Indirectly in- 
deed it is conceivable that even in economic terms they have 
far more than paid their way. But this is a question in 
which idealistic moralists appear to be not greatly inter- 
ested. The sense of economic responsibility is the utili- 
tarian contribution to the conception of morality. 

These are but a few of the good men seen in the visions 
of moral philosophers. It will be admitted, I think, that 
they are all good men though not all equally pleasing to 


THE MANY MORAL WORLDS 39 


each individual taste. Every moral philosophy is moral 
if once you grasp the point of view. Yet to resolve them 
into a system of good men based upon a universal standard 
of classification, seems quite hopeless. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE LOGIC OF THE STANDARD 


§ 10. The odiousness of comparisons. §11. The moral standard 
and the business point of view. §12. Social utility in law and 
orthodox morality. § 13. “Positive” morality. 


ANY an orthodox moralist will admit that the 
facts with regard to moral judgments make the 
common standard at least difficult to verify. 

But he will then probably appeal to a logical necessity in 
the form of the following dilemma: either a common 
standard or no morality. In other words, we must have 
a standard if there is to be a moral life. 

This states the question for the present chapter: why 
must you have a standard? What is the nature of the 
necessity? It is my purpose to show that the necessity in 
question is not so much a moral necessity as a business 
necessity. 


§ 10 


And I wonder why, to begin with, in a specifically moral 
relation, it is necessary to make any definitive judgment 
whatever. Suppose that I form a new acquaintance and 
that the acquaintance ripens into friendship: why is not 
the fact of the friendship enough for me? That fact 
means that my friend “‘grows upon acquaintance”. I find 
in him more background, a more engaging personal charac- 
ter, a larger possibility of sympathy and understanding, 

40 


TPihewOGLC Or “MH Eo STAN DARD 41 


than I had expected; and though we understand one an- 
other, he does not cease to stimulate my imagination. I 
may not state to myself in any final fashion what it is 
that attracts, but something of all this must be true if there 
is any real friendship, if the friendship is any moral fact 
whatever. In the face of this achieved fact, it seems to 
me that I should be the veriest prig to ask, Yes, but is he 
moral? That is, where does he stand in the common 
moral scale? Not that I will refrain from judging him or 
from analysing his character. Quite the contrary, the 
moral process is, I should say, analysis without end. My 
point is that the growing friendship is itself the process 
of analysis and that so far as it satisfies there is no further 
appeal. It would be a very different matter if I were 
swallowing a mass of revolting obscenity, or closing my 
eyes to a taste for sharp practice, for the sake of the in- 
troductions he could offer me or for his tips on the stock- 
market. 

It is a maxim of polite manners that comparisons are 
odious. ‘This is one of the cases where the maxims of 
manners are so much more moral than the maxims of 
orthodox morality. At an afternoon tea Mrs. Jones, a 
professionally moral person, begins to question me about 
my friend Brown, of whom she disapproves. Aware of 
this I take the opportunity to explain to Mrs. Jones un- 
obtrusively some of the nicer points about the personality 
of Brown which are not evident to the world at large. But 
Mrs. Jones is not satisfied, and presently she challenges 
me with (referring to another friend of mine of whom she 
approves), “But surely you will admit that Mr. Smith 
is a finer moral character.” ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,” is 
my crushing reply, “that is the kind of question I never 


42 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ask.” “Is it not the question you ought to ask?” retorts 
Mrs. Jones severely, inwardly putting me down as a moral 
sceptic and a suspicious person; while I marvel at the 
stupidity of so many of the persons who adopt morality as 
their profession. 

Such a question may be excusable in the small child who 
presses you to declare that he is a better boy than his 
brother; or possibly in the fifteen-year-old girl who rejects 
any friendship which will not admit that she is more loved 
and more admired than any other. Perhaps we may also 
pardon the youth of the undergraduate who is “working 
for marks’. But our refusal to answer the child, and our 
haste to assure him that our love for him can never be a 
matter of comparison—our anxiety to eradicate the dis- 
position that lies behind the question—make clear enough 
our conviction that all such questions are morally false. 


§ 11 


Yet we do make comparisons between persons and many 
such comparisons seem to be unavoidable. What, then, is 
their meaning and motive? In the answer to this question 
I shall venture to draw upon my experience as a college 
teacher; a kind of experience which tends, I suspect, to 
bring out rather clearly the outstanding features of any 
system of grading persons, its necessity from the administra- 
tive point of view, its irrelevance from the point of view of 
truth. The college teacher is called upon at the end of each 
term, first to classify his pupils as ‘‘passed” or “failed”, and 
then among the “passed” to distinguish some four or five 
grades of excellence. In a very large class the task is not 
personally embarrassing, since one’s relations to one’s pupils 
are then of necessity more or less impersonal. But to a 


THE LOGIC. OF bTHtesS TANDARD 43 


small class, say of fifteen or twenty, with whom individ- 
ually I have arrived at personal and friendly relations, 
and each of whom has perhaps come to stand in my mind 
for a personality, I feel almost tempted to apologize for 
a violation of the rules of courtesy. In theory these 
grades stand for intellectual attainment, in practice they 
are also moral estimates. But from either point of view 
they appear to be far from decisive and no one thinks of 
taking a student’s grade as more than a very partial in- 
dication of his qualities of mind or character. 

These indeed could not be expressed in terms of any 
system of grades. Whenever I read a set of examination 
papers what chiefly impresses me is that the merits, or de- 
merits, so far as they are evident, are all different. One 
man distinguishes himself by reach of imagination; an- 
other, naturally slow-minded, delights me by the certainty 
of his final attainment; a third displays his unusual in- 
telligence by squarely answering the questions that have 
been asked and not some others; while a fourth, whose 
blundering paper would have to rank low in any scientific 
scale, nevertheless gives evidence that for him the course 
of study has been a moral and intellectual awakening. 
And possibly the best material for a moral or intellectual 
valuation would consist in a group of papers in which each 
student had seriously set himself the task of explaining 
what the course had meant to him as a matter of personal 
experience. But such exhibits would hardly serve the 
purpose of the college administration. 

For the purpose of these reports is not moral but utili- 
tarian. What is wanted is not so much a true appreciation 
of the student’s merits as an appreciation that will be in- 
telligible to the public—in other words, a negotiable ap- 


44 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


preciation. ‘The college is not a person, seeking personal 
satisfaction, but an institution, depending more or less 
upon the favor of the public. At the very least it must 
have students. But it is not enough for the student that 
he is satisfied with what he gets—as it would be if he 
were attending a symphony concert. Partly on behalf of 
personal and social prestige, but mainly in these latter days 
as a recommendation to business or professional oppor- 
tunity, he wants a certified statement, and of course a 
statement that will appeal to the business man or the 
administrator. Neither the personal appreciations of his 
teachers nor his own record of experience would serve this 
purpose; for though individually more significant they 
would call for attention and discernment on the part of 
those to whom they were addressed. ‘They would doubt- 
less be edifying, but the business man or the administrator 
has no time for edification. What he wants is to get things 
done, and his question is therefore, What to do? Shall 
I take this man or reject him? The simplest answer to 
this question from the college is the degree, preferably the 
same degree for all. 

The college degree involves as a rule only the question 
of passed or failed. ‘The distinctions of excellence among 
the passed are the outcome of somewhat different motives; 
no less utilitarian, however, and no less irrelevant to the 
distinctively moral valuation. The truly moral incentive 
to good work, we are all agreed, is the value of the work 
itself. What does that mean to you? But experience 
seems to suggest that better results will be attained by ap- 
pealing to the competitive instinct and the desire for in- 
vidious distinctions (1. e., by enlisting the immoral on be- 
half of the moral). Whether the result achieved is truly 


Timp LOGLO (OF “Tih © &sevANDARD 45 


moral—in other words, whether it is truly cultural—may 
perhaps be doubted. 

But surely, I shall hear, it is nonsense to suppose that 
the motive embodied in examinations and grades and 
standards of conduct is solely competitive. For is it not 
clear that objective standards will be no less necessary if 
I am to satisfy the truly moral desire of measuring, for 
my own self-satisfaction, my own progress—this, if you 
please, as a part of the critical life? To this I will reply 
by asking, What is the relevance of this so-called objective 
standard to my self-satisfaction? For example—for some 
time past my leisure hours have been consumed by the 
reading of a long and somewhat ponderous volume in the 
German language on a subject related to philosophy. 
Owing to the circumstances of my own thinking, few books 
have aroused in me a more deeply questioning interest. 
Few have been read with such close attention. This book 
has been for me an experience. Yet how well I could 
stand an examination on the book of the academic sort, 
I hardly know—I have not read it with this in mind. 
Am I to admit, then, that this experience which I have 
erlebt, or lived through, may have been all an illusion, 
a mere nothing? Or, if I must speak in terms of 
“progress”, may I entertain the possibility that I am now 
just what I was before I read the book, not having lived 
meanwhile? If so it will be well to close our discussion 
at this point, once for all, with the conclusion that morality 
is moonshine; for if you must have a “‘test” for morality, 
I can think of none so real as this. 

I will carry the illustration a step further. The college 
student of the present generation, full of practical wisdom 
beyond his years, is disposed to greet each subject of study 


46 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


proposed to him with the question, What’s the use of it? 
What do I get out of it? The question is put more in- 
sistently, of course, to the studies of literature and philos- 
ophy; and addressed to philosophy (say at the close of a 
course in philosophy) it is likely to mean, Well, what is the 
conclusion? What is the right answer? I forgive the 
question in the student because he is unconsciously reflect- 
ing the spirit of the age. But I am tempted to suggest as 
the “right answer” (recalling a similar inquiry), An evil 
and adulterous generation seeketh after a conclusion, and 
there shall no conclusion be given it. 

Seriously, however, I might ask this: if your motive be 
practical wisdom, do you think it any part of practical 
wisdom to study the literature of philosophy? Come, let 
us reason together. One of the more practical problems 
of philosophy is the problem of an ideal order of society. 
This problem has perplexed and absorbed the best minds 
of every thinking generation since it was proposed by 
Plato in his “Republic”. The literature of the subject is 
enormous and ever increasing. Assuming the possibility 
of a “right” answer, how high would you estimate the 
probability that this or that teacher of philosophy has 
found it? In the true language of practical wisdom, 
What could you bet on it? Would it not be wiser to put 
your money on a sure cure for cancer or tuberculosis? 
You have doubtless the right to expect from your teacher a 
frank statement of his attitude towards the problem, of his 
personal feeling and opinion, but what would be your 
secret opinion of the teacher who advertises his own as the 
finally “right” answer? 

And meanwhile you ask what you have got out of it, 
out of the study of the problem. But this question, which 


os 


THe LPOGIC OK THE STANDARD 47 


is indeed a real question, you can answer for yourself. 
Has the study of social philosophy been a dull and mean- 
ingless affair, or has it given you food for the imagination 
—has it been a stimulus to reflection? If so, you have 
surely got something very important, if life be important. 
You are now, as a person, not just what you were before, 
and the world before you is not quite the same world. 
Nor could it again be made the same world by any process 
of reversal. You have got “progress”, if you please— 
not indeed the progress which you can see in a building 
rising higher day by day, nor the progress that can be 
exhibited in a balance-sheet, but progress in experience 
and thus in life, which is the only moral progress. 

I have introduced this question of academic standards 
because to my mind it suggests very neatly the true logic 
of standardized morality. It has no less a bearing upon 
the logic of science. To those who would uncover the 
scientific motif I will recommend the now popular “ 
telligence-tests”, as representing at once the logical de- 
velopment of the system of academic grades and of the 
application of science to life. But my present purpose is 
moral. ‘Those who conceive morality to consist in devotion 
to a standard are likely to cherish the impression that they 
have surpassed all others in setting up an ideal spiritually 
lofty and austere. To them I would point out that, on the 
contrary, they are importing into morality something 
closely resembling the pragmatic point of view of the man 
of business. 

For if I apply the moral standard to my friends it is 
not because I am in any doubt about their worth or about 
what is due from me in the way of loyalty. I am think- 
ing of how they will be estimated by others and of the 


in- 


48 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


attendant advantages or difficulties; of how my other 
friends will take them, of how far my reputation may 
suffer, and of the possible effects upon business or profes- 
sion. If a man loves a woman and wishes to make her 
his wife he may indeed desire to know whether his love is 
genuine, whether it rests upon a firm basis of under- 
standing. But no reference to a standard will help him 
here. And if he comes to the point of asking whether she 
is the proper person for him to marry, it means in plain 
words that he is asking whether she is a socially market- 
able commodity. It is the same kind of question as that 
which might arise concerning the home that one owns, to 
which, say, I am much attached and which has therefore 
for me a moral value. It is worth fifteen thousand on 
the market, but a persistent bidder, superior to market- 
valuations, offers me thirty thousand. Am I morally 
justified in rejecting the offer? This is a real question; 
but it is answered if after due reflection I am content to 
let the offer go. To refer the question to a standard is 
to adopt the business man’s point of view; then of course 
I am bound to accept the offer. The appraisal by stand- 
ard means that what I have in mind is not so much what 
is good as what is current and marketable; not so much 
what is true as what is statable; and not so much what will 
yield satisfaction as what can be easily managed. 


§ 12 


The utilitarian motif implied in the moral standard will 
again be evident if we view the orthodox morality in the 
light of the analogy of law. It is no mere epithet to call 
this point of view “legalistic”. The traditional moral 
philosophy is crammed with legal metaphor, and most of 


eet CG, OP eb STAN DARD 49 


its vocabulary is that of the law. The two most typical of 
its modern exponents are Kant and Bishop Butler. 
Schopenhauer refers in biting terms to Kant’s “judicial 
imagery’; in Butler—though one of the shrewdest and 
most enlightened of those who have ever discoursed upon 
“human nature”’—it seems that most of the moral life is 
spent in a court of justice pleading a case before “‘the bar 
of conscience’. 

Now if the ideal of law is justice, the administration of 
law is none the less of necessity mainly utility. For in the 
last analysis moral justice is intimately personal. In the 
distribution of an estate, for example, a liquidation of the 
assets and a proportionate distribution of the cash- 
proceeds may be as remote from justice as Solomon’s pro- 
posal to divide the child. The best to be said of it is that 
it treats all alike; but since all may be very different this 
is little. The ideally just distribution, especially where the 
property is various in kind, would be dictated by a careful 
regard for the personal tastes and the personal situations 
of the several parties. This, however, would be less a 
problem for a court, even for a court in equity, than per- 
haps for a friend of the family of long standing. But 
only the mutual understanding of the parties themselves 
could finally solve the problem. Yet if they are unable to 
reach an understanding, the rule of liquidation and pro- 
portionate distribution will be effective in closing the case. 

Moral justice presupposes a personal acquaintance with 
the parties concerned. ‘The justice of law is blindfolded; 
and in modern civilization justice is necessarily blind- 
folded by the fact that the parties to a suit can only in 
rare cases be known to the court. Hence such maxims of 
utility as that ignorance of the law is no defence. ‘This 


50 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


rule would be outrageous in the administration of a family, 
not wholly justifiable in the administration of a school. 
If a child pleads that he didn’t know, or even that he had 
forgotten, it would in most cases be simple cruelty not to 
inquire into the fact, even at cost of having to deal with 
the delicate and uncertain distinction between an excusable 
forgetting and no earnest desire to remember. But only 
the parent, who knows the child well, can form a satis- 
factory judgment. The judge, facing an entire stranger, 
would need more than the penetration of Solomon. His 
only way out is to accept no excuse whatever. 

And this is the only safe course. Safety is indeed one 
of the most obvious motives both of law and of orthodox 
morality. Laws are made deliberately with this in mind, 
and nine just men are bound lest one unjust escape. Why 
should not mutual consent be sufficient for divorce? You 
will find many persons who see no reason in justice and 
decency why this should not be. But they will oppose 
making it a law; first perhaps, because it might open the 
door to legalized prostitution under the guise of marriage 
(which means that it would then be uncertain whom we 
could invite to meet whom at a dinner-party); but further 
because it would raise very complicated questions about the 
support of former wives, or of half-parented children, 
which our institutions are unprepared to handle. The 
motive of safety is no less apparent in legal decisions. 
Almost invariably indeed they betray a curious intermin- 
gling of two very different considerations: on the one hand 
justice as regards the parties in question, on the other the 
question of how far this justice might result in illegitimate 
applications on the part of others. Safety, again, is the 
motive of orthodox morality; one of whose maxims seems 


THE LOGIC OF THE'STANDARD 51 


to be that, ‘This would be all right for you and me but 
it would never do for the masses.” ‘‘Sound” and “‘dan- 
gerous” are its two most important terms. In that large 
and perplexing field of the morality of sex, fear of doubt- 
ful cases seems to be the ruling principle. Did George 
Eliot do wrong in living with Lewes as his wife? From 
her letters one’s impression would be that few legitimate 
marriages have been so successful or so truly moral. 
Orthodox morality fears to render any judgment but 
“wrong”, because in probably nine cases out of ten the 
result would have been an ignoble scandal. 

This is not to say that I might not sympathize with a 
certain regard for safety. Personally I have little taste 
for adventure except in the fields of the spirit; although 
I cherish a secret admiration for those who do venture 
to translate thought into act and sympathy for those who 
fall. But I do not offer this as a criterion of “sound 
morality”, but rather to suggest that this phrase embodies 
a contradiction in terms. What each may venture—which 
means, how much morality each may expect to get into his 
life—is a question for each to answer. All that I suggest 
here is that safety be not confused with morality. 

All of these utilitarian considerations resolve themselves, 
it seems to me, into the simple pragmatic question of what 
to do. And I would point out that, in spite of the “law’s 
delay’’, it is the first and most imperative duty of the court, 
not to dispense justice, but to render decisions—decisions 
that shall be as just as possible, but in any case decisions. 
And thus its function is to solve problems if it can but at 
all events to dispose of them. Decisions and methods of 
making decisions form again the most conspicuous ele- 
ment in the efficiency of the modern administrator or 


52 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


business man; who faces each day a heavy morning mail, 
and whose only safe rule is to dispose of it if possible all 
on the same day, because tomorrow will bring another. 
These inquiries are disposed of as far as possible in form- 
letters, or standardized replies, the purpose of which is to 
enlighten the correspondent if possible, but in any case to 
silence him. The so-called moral standard is expected to 
perform the same function. When a man says that we 
must have a moral standard, all that he means is, I take 
it, that we must have some method of disposing day by 
day of the necessary business of life. 

I will not despise the business side of life. It will be 
sufficient to point out that the business side stands for neces- 
sity rather than choice. It marks the region of activity 
that we cannot hope to make moral—or living. And there- 
fore if you are looking for the special character of the moral 
life you must seek it in the contrast to business method. 
Business method aims at action and results, with the great- 
est economy of thought. The moral life is not so much 
action as thoughtful action, and the moral fruit of action 
is not “results” but experience of life. But the introduc- 
tion of thought into action changes the whole character of 
the problem. Moral problems are continuing problems, in- 
viting contemplation. ‘The moral results of action are not 
so much conclusions as new developments of older ques- 
tions. The moral problem, in short, is the problem of life. 
Problems of business call for definite answers, to be given at 
once; the problem of life cannot be thus disposed of. 


§ 13 


The association of morality with authority, and of the 
moral attitude with the didactic, represents what is called 


Tie LOGIC OF THE STANDARD 53 


“positive” morality. “Positive morality” seems to mean 
that the moral world is a world of definite extent (and not 
hopelessly big), which is being gradually surveyed by suc- 
cessive generations of moralists, whose results, final as far 
as they go, are being steadily incorporated into certain ever 
more established principles. In other words, positive mo- 
rality presupposes that ethics is a science; that the moral 
world is a world of fact; and that the moral life, however 
complex it appear to be, presents a specifically practical 
problem, capable in the end of a scientific solution. Tradi- 
tional morality represents, then, the “accumulated experi- 
ence of mankind’’, which, as the experience of a world of 
unchanging law, can be objectively stated and therefore 
taught with authority to the next generation. 

Now things that can be definitely stated can indeed be 
taught. One may be taught the rules and forms of gram- 
mar, elementary geometry, the fundamental principles of 
physics and chemistry, and how to operate a typewriter, 
a printing-press, or a motor-car. One may even be taught 
certain broadly recognized rules of literary or musical 
composition. And if morality could thus be taught, by 
those who know, we should have no alternative but to 
recognize their authority. In his “Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity”, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (a fine represen- 
tative of “positive morality”) proposes a simple theory of 
government to the effect that those who know should tell 
the others what to do and make them do it. Those who 
know are certainly entitled to do so. 

But those who ‘“‘know” I suspect always of knowing 
nothing about morality. Upon them the significance of the 
Socratic “Know thyself” is probably wasted. Morality I 
have defined as the self-conscious living of life. In this 


54 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


view morality is not positive but problematic. ‘‘Positive 
morality” is valuable mainly for childhood and youth. 
It would more fitly be presented under the title of “The 
Rules of Practical Wisdom’. ‘These rules—against the 
commission (e. g.) of lying, theft, adultery, and murder 
—may easily be taught, but so may the rules of grammar. 
And they bear the same relation to morality that the rules 
of grammar bear to the expression of meaning. Namely, 
the meaning to be expressed (for example, in the use of the 
subjunctive in Latin or German) emerges only when we 
contemplate the exceptions; and the more immediately 
language is alive with meaning, as for example in poetry, 
the more freely do the exceptions make light of the rules. 
For those not yet prepared to attack the problem of life 
on their own responsibility the rules of practical wisdom 
are safe rules. But the safer they are, the more non- 
committal and meaningless. The youth emerging into 
manhood discovers, perhaps with a shock, that none of 
these rules is intended, even by the orthodox, to be taken 
quite literally and absolutely. The rule against lying, if 
this be taken to stand for absolute openness and sincerity, 
is violated by good men every hour of the day; for no 
man, however honorable, fails to make some distinction 
between those who, by virtue of their relation to him, are 
entitled to have the truth from him and those who are not. 
And the attempt to systematize the rules leads only to 
endless casuistry. Casuistry is only the legitimate refine- 
ment of orthodox ethics. 


1 Some persons find comfort in the distinction between concealing the truth 
and telling a falsehood—as if there were any object in concealing the truth 
except to mislead! Others find a curious satisfaction in preserving the form 
of honesty while parting with the substance. They think that somehow, while 
sinning in fact, they have preserved respect for the ideal. I wonder if they 
have done so. At any rate, I may recommend to them a study of the de- 


TITEL OGIO. OF; DHE: STANDARD 55 


When, now, the young man, come to himself, so to speak, 
questions the meaning of these rules, he discovers that the 
meaning of the same rules is different for different men, 
and also that different men prefer different rules. One 
man prefers honesty at the cost of brutality, another carries 
considerateness to the point of deceit. For each the signif- 
icance of the rules, like that of the rules of grammar or 
of the words in the dictionary, lies in their use in express- 
ing the meaning of life for himself. And for each the 
meaning of life is a problem, a personal problem, calling 
for an original solution. 

This means that the moral life is an art rather than an 
applied science. It is a creation. And morality can then 
be “taught”, or not, in just the sense in which art can be 
taught. One cannot be taught to create. One may, as 
I have pointed out, be taught certain rules of literary or 
musical composition, or certain laws of physics; but no 
one can be taught to be a new Shakespeare or Beethoven, to 
write novels equal to Thackeray’s, or even to devise a 
really new machine. On the other hand no artist creates 
in vacuo. Beethoven’s creations were based upon a study 
of the forms of composition used by those before him. 
The artist learns to create by studying the great masters: 
he becomes an artist when he ceases to imitate them. The 
great masters in morality—it would be difficult indeed to 
name them. They are not specifically the moralists. 
They are often for each of us those whom we have known 
most intimately. They include, in the end, all who, in 
lightful Samuel Pepys, who somewhere in his “Diary” records that, having 
received a bribe from a captain in the navy in the form of a packet of soy- 
ereigns, he was careful, in emptying the packet into the drawer of his desk, 


to close his eyes, so that he could afterwards say, “I did not see any sovereigns 
in the packet.” 


56 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


history, art, literature, or philosophy, have had any im- 
portant experience to reveal regarding the significance of 
human life and human nature. 

But the masters of life are never “authorities”. Their 
conceptions of life are not “standards”. As a mode of 
expressing the attitude towards them of a morally respon- 
sible agent I find the sentence curiously fitting which 
Aristippus, not perhaps the most moral of the moralists, 
applied to the pleasures of life (having applied it in the 
first instance to his mistress, Lais): “Exo, otk éxomau. 
“T possess, I am not possessed.” I will enjoy the pleas- 
ures of life, I will not be dominated by them. And thus I 
may in the true and proper sense enjoy the moralities 
presented by the various experiences of mankind. I will 
understand them all, I will make them all my own: I will 
be in bondage to none. . 


CHAPTER V 
THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 


§ 14. The categorical imperative. § 15. The basis of authority. 
§ 16. The authoritarian tradition. §17. Austere morality. § 18. 
Authority vs. morality. §19. The sentiment of reverence. 


§ 14 


RTHODOX morality has just been treated as 
standardized morality. In this chapter and the 
next I shall develop its implications as the 

morality of authority. 

By the morality of authority I mean morality formulated 
in terms of duty. Among moral philosophers the most 
uncompromising exponent of this conception is Immanuel 
Kant; for whom it seems that the one necessary, sufficient, 
and all-inclusive criterion of morality is that morality 
commands.* Now for Kant this means that no merely 
utilitarian morality can ever be moral. The utilitarian 
says, Be good and you will be happy. But this, says Kant, 
is mere advice. It means only, Be good if you wish to be 
happy; and it is open to the reply, But I don’t wish to be 
happy. The utilitarian imperative (Kant can speak only 
in terms of “‘imperatives’’) is thus a hypothetical impera- 
tive, while the imperative of morality is always a categori- 


1 This in spite of Kant’s no less positive insistence that morality is also 
freedom. Of this Professor Dewey remarks (The Influence of Darwin and 
Other Essays, p. 65) that “The marriage of freedom and authority was then 
celebrated with the understanding that sentimental primacy went to the 
former and practical control to the latter.” I question “the understanding”, 
but this neatly describes the result. . 

5 


58 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


cal imperative. Morality offers no advice. Morality 
cares not to persuade you of the wisdom, or profit, or beauty 
of goodness. Morality is interested only in the authority 
of goodness. And therefore morality speaks exclusively in 
terms of “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not’. 

For Kant, then, the issue of morality takes the form of 
authority vs. utility. And his vindication of morality is a 
laborious defence of this distinction. It is my purpose in 
the presentation of authoritarian morality to show that the 
distinction is false; and that not only is authority based 
upon utility, but that among the several elements involved 
in the assertion of authority utility is morally the most 
respectable. 


§ 15 


Although Kant wrote nearly a century and half ago, his 
scholastic formulation is valid today as an expression of 
the popular idea of morality. Even by those who propose 
to take their duty lightly, morality is commonly conceived 
as duty. But morality has not always been viewed as 
duty. In the ethical literature of the Greeks the conception 
is at least not prominent; and the modern reader of Greek 
ethics, at least the reader bred in the protestant religious 
tradition, has the sense that a certain undefined but fa- 
miliar element is missing. Greek ethics is cast mainly in 
the form of a discussion of ‘“‘the good”. This suggests a 
very different picture from that to which we are accustomed. 
Instead of the child being admonished by his parents, or 
the soldier receiving orders from his superior officer, we 
have before us the picture of a youth to whom the various 
possibilities of life are being unfolded and who is now in- 
vited to choose for himself that which is most lovely and 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 59 


beautiful. His elders and friends may indeed take upon 
themselves the responsibility of enlightening his choice. 
But the assumption is that nothing but enlightenment is 
necessary. To judge that this or that is good is as a matter 
of course to choose it. 

It is true that the conservative Greek morality was cast 
in the form of reverence for the gods and obedience to the 
law of the state. But the Greek gods were hardly adapted 
to the role of moral authorities. Apart from the scan- 
dalous stories told about them, which Plato properly de- 
plores, they seem to lack the necessary authoritative rela- 
tion. They are authorities, it would seem, only in the 
sense in which today wealth and fashion are authorities in 
matters of taste and social convention. They may inter- 
fere in human affairs, if they care to do so, because they 
have the power, but it is not clear that their power rests 
upon any special basis of right. 

The Kantian conception of morality reflects a totally 
different tradition, the tradition, namely, of protestant 
Christianity, which is mainly an Old Testament tradition, 
thus a Hebrew tradition. Kant, we remember, was bred in 
the atmosphere of German protestantism and German 
pietism. Now in the Old Testament God is Jahveh, or 
Jehovah, the tribal god of the Hebrews, and as the tribal 
god he is in some sense the father of the tribe. But the idea 
of fatherhood embodies two motifs. The father may be 
expected to forgive offences against himself, such as one in 
another relation will never forgive. On the other hand 
the father is especially authorized to punish. How deeply 
instinctive is this conception, both parents and teachers can 
testify. The parent who does not hesitate to punish 
severely is often fiercely jealous of punishment by another, 


60 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


and the child will take meekly from his parent what he 
would resent from the teacher. It may be said, then, that 
both the Old Testament and the New Testament teach the 
fatherhood of God. But while in the New Testament God 
is the tender parent, in the Old Testament he is the stern 
parent. The New Testament teaches God’s mercy, the Old 
Testament asserts his authority. 

But the tribal god was something more than a father 
to his tribe, in the customary human sense. The human 
father begets his children, but he does not create them; he 
is not infrequently surprised by what he has begotten. 
In the Hebrew cosmology God was both the father and 
creator of man, and likewise the creator of the world. 
This meant that the authority of God was absolute, and 
further that God was the sole and final source of any au- 
thority to be found in the universe. The logic of the con- 
ception is very simple: shall I not do what I will with my 
own? And what is so truly and certainly my own as that 
which I have created? That this is the true logic of prop- 
erty would be conceded, I believe, both by communists 
and by individualists; whose point of difference regarding 
property would then lie in the question of who has created 
it. But it seems that no human being does more than 
partially create. Even the novelist who creates characters 
is dismayed to find them taking courses of their own. 
God, however, is the absolute creator. And therefore he 
has absolute authority. 

Such I take to be the final “basis of authority” under- 
lying, however obscurely, every authoritarian theory of 
morality, not excepting those which are avowedly agnostic 
or atheistic; underlying likewise every authoritarian theory 


THEeeMOlLV EG: On AOLAHORLTY 61 


of the state. In the mediaeval tradition, persisting well 
into modern times, morality was based squarely upon the 
will of God, all right was divine right, and all earthly 
authority was a question of to whom God had delegated 
authority. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, 
which came to a head in seventeenth-century England, was 
a reply to the divine right of popes. It fell before the di- 
vine right of the people—for the rights of the people had 
to be no less divinely authenticated than the rights of kings. 
The eighteenth-century “rights of man’ were still to come. 
It seemed out of the question to establish any human re- 
lations without erecting a “seat of authority”, which was 
always God’s authority. Thus we find divine right 
asserted quite as despotically in Puritan New England as 
in England herself under Charles the First. 


§ 16 


So long as the morality of authority implied the back- 
ground of a theocratic universe, with God as the creator 
and father, it stood for an idea, and for a genuinely moral 
idea, even if, as I shall point out later, the idea failed to 
warrant authority. Under the growing influence of ra- 
tionalism the theocratic conception lost its power and the 
authority of church and king declined. But the demand 
for authority survived—as it survives to this day. It was 
now, however, no longer an idea but a tradition. 

In morals the seat of authority was now said to be, not 
external, but internal. The quality of authority was be- 
stowed upon our perceptions of good and bad. The “moral 
sense” was defined and set apart, secure from criticism, 
from our sense of other things. And Bishop Butler set up 


62 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


the authority of ‘conscience’. As Butler would have it,” 
the deliverances of conscience are in no sense my personal 
judgments, either reasoned or instinctive, of the goodness or 
badness of things. Conscience, like the “daimon” of 
Socrates, is “the voice of God”, speaking within me and 
compelling me to do blindly what on my own judgment I 
should hardly choose to do. The tradition of authority 
survives today, somewhat attenuated and disguised, among 
the moralists who hold that the word “ought” expresses 
something unique and per se unanalysable, and among the 
political philosophers who find a similar unanalysable in 
the conception of “sovereignty”. The implication is that 
these conceptions proceed from a power other and higher 
than ourselves. The authoritarian tradition survives un- 
der the seemingly most adverse theoretical conditions in 
the moral idea seductively described as “‘self-realization” ; 
which, following T. H. Green, warns you that your only 
“real self” will be that which chooses a “common good”, 
expressing in the end the will of God. 

Modern science has parted with the will of God. It is 
the special claim of science that she brings us down out of 
the clouds of empty abstraction, romantic imagination, and 
futile longing (which the Freudians have shown to be “‘in- 
fantile”) to the ground of solid and tangible values. For 
the mysticism of the divine will science substitutes the 
realities of human welfare. And this gospel is often an- 
nounced, in tones that remind one of Lucretius, as a glad 
emancipation from religious superstition. 

One might then expect that, here at least, the tone of 


2 As a matter of fact, Butler’s analysis of “conscience” is really an analysis, 
so modern in some respects that he more than anticipates T. H. Green, of the 
process of reflection; and it is interesting to note that, while Butler’s sermons 
were written to oppose Shaftesbury, both moralists made the essence of mo- 
rality to consist in reflective action—and both used the term “reflection”. 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 63 


authority would give way to gentle persuasiveness and sweet 
reasonableness. But not at all. The “orthodoxy” of to- 
day is as often scientific as religious. This scientific view 
of the world has merely appropriated the panoply of 
authority after destroying the person of the Author. The 
scientific sociologist proclaims the sacred authority of 
Society in tones that recall the ancient law of Sinai. The 
modern judge endeavors to awe the condemned criminal by 
explaining that he is sentenced for an offence against So- 
ciety. The majesty of the law, which was formerly the 
majesty of God, is now (since the law cannot dispense with 
majesty) the majesty of the Social Order. And this con- 
ception of the sacredness of the group as against the in- 
dividual is re-echoed down to the gangs of boys on the 
street-corner. A college Greek-letter fraternity in expelling 
a recalcitrant member (who may have been too intelligent 
to take his fraternity seriously) conceives that it thereby 
places upon him a moral stigma. 

The scientific biologist then fortifies the authority of so- 
ciety by explaining that in the struggle for existence the 
solidarity of the species is all-important. His special 
authority is therefore the authority of the Laws of Nature, 
and for the majesty of God he substitutes the majesty of the 
Species. His lead is followed by the scientific anthropolo- 
gist, who discovers in the solidarity of the species the origin 
and ground of the belief in God and now proposes to recon- 
cile science and religion by demonstrating the solid useful- 
ness of religion. 

It was very interesting during the World War to observe 
all the more ardent militarists rallying quietly to the cause 
of religion. Omitting those whose thoughts were turned 
to serious things by the horror of the situation, perhaps by 


64 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


personal losses, I have in mind the many others, men of 
hard fact, not conspicuous at any time for the sentiment of 
reverence, and hardly to be charged with a longing for 
communion with God, who suddenly discovered that re- 
ligion was a good thing. Directly or indirectly, they had 
learned from the anthropologists (what they might also 
have learned from Cicero) that religion is the necessary 
support of patriotism. Much of the religion preached to- 
day is of this pragmatic variety. It should be described, 
not as religious belief, but rather as a practical and 
utilitarian application of Voltaire’s suggestion that if God 
did not exist we should have to invent him. For—and this 
is the major premise—if we are to have morality (that is, 
if we are to have social order) we must have authority. 


§ 17 


And so beneath “authority” we may read utility, or social 
convenience. But if social convenience were the only mo- 
tive in question a moral law would be a simple business 
proposition, authority would stand only for sound judg- 
ment, and criticism of authority would be as little reprehen- 
sible as any other criticism. This would not wholly ac- 
count for the attitude of authority. To explain this attitude 
I think we must add to the motive of social convenience 
(never quite divorced from the interests of class or party) a 
certain animal passion which manifests itself in the love of 
domination and the love of punishment. Authority which 
is neither masterful nor vindictive, authority which seeks 
only to persuade, seems to be—well, ‘lacking in authority”. 

Such at any rate is the reading to be derived from that 
more extreme form of orthodox morality which the radicals 
call ‘‘Puritanism’’, but which calls itself “‘austere’. I have 


Pern. OL bn O Pa AU TH ORI TY 65 


no doubt that ‘“‘Puritanism”’ is often a jest at all seriousness. 
On the other hand, to identify the serious with the dogmatic 
attitude is begging the question. The Puritanical attitude 
is only the more resolute expression of the common orthodox 
morality of authority. It is because morality is identified 
with authority that it becomes the mark of ‘‘a moral person” 
to guide, instruct, admonish, and, if possible, to punish his 
fellows. It is authority that justifies “the good example” 
and ‘‘the brother’s keeper’”—functions hardly compatible 
with a respect for his personality. In the orthodox con- 
ception morality is inseparable from censorship. ‘“Cen- 
soriousness”’ may indeed be formally deprecated, but it is 
only a saving censoriousness that separates positive morality 
from moral scepticism. To be tolerant of your neighbor’s 
vices is to prove that you are yourself without serious con- 
victions. Every moral person must then become a moral- 
ist, whose function is “to award praise and blame”. In 
the older and ‘‘sterner” days moral earnestness had to be 
authenticated by a fierce denunciation of the evil-doer. But 
we still look for “moral indignation’—or “righteous in- 
dignation’”—the assumption being that morality without 
indignation must be unreal, and that indignation is the only 
mood appropriate for a communication of moral values. 
In a story by Nemirovitch-Dantschenko a mother—a 
peasant-woman, the mistress of a landed-proprietor, who 
by her own effort has become a person of some education 
—is giving some sad parting advice to her son, a lad of 
sixteen, who is to be sent to school, and from whom she is to 
be separated indefinitely at the instance of the father: 
“Do you, Sasha, not take it upon yourself to judge either 
your father or your mother. Thatisasin. You donot re- 
ceive an education that you may learn to judge, but that you 


66 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


may learn to understand.” To judge (i.e, “to award 
praise and blame’’)—or to understand? This is the ques- 
tion. The question may not be free from perplexity. But 
I ask which of these two functions stands for a more charac- 
teristically spiritual achievement and which, on the other 
hand, is more nearly allied to animal passion and resent- 
ment. The morality of authority calls for judgment; that is 
to say, for punishment; in the end, for vengeance. ‘‘Who,” 
cries Cotton Mather, in the book written to justify the burn- 
ing of witches, ‘“‘shall be the instrument of God’s venge- 
ance?” 

Such was the “‘austere”’ morality of the Puritans—austere 
and forbidding. The illustration is doubtless extreme, yet 
it is the extreme that most clearly suggests the motive and 
raises the question. There are passages in Cotton Mather’s 
diary which indicate that he rejoiced over the number of 
the damned—on the ground, rather evidently, that the 
chances of his own salvation seemed thereby improved. 
Viewed anthropologically, this representative of the 
Puritans appears to differ but little from any other 
primitive barbarian, red, brown, or black, who thinks to 
propitiate his tribal deity by the shedding of blood and at 
the same time enjoys in the practice of cruelty a liberation 
of atavistic impulse. 

This atavistic explanation is suggested rather forcibly 
when we note how much moral indignation is expended, 
and with what mysterious ferocity of resentment, upon sins 
of sex—and quite apart from any question of betrayal or 
desertion. That the contemplation of cruelty or treachery 
should excite a desire to punish seems intelligible enough; 
but that this desire should be excited by the attraction of 
other persons for one another suggests something sub- 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 67 


human, something even more deeply and mysteriously ani- 
mal than animal jealousy. One is reminded of the sudden 
nausea induced by the sight of blood or by contact with a 
corpse; or of that instinctive repulsion to suffering and 
mutilation which may even paralyse pity; or, again, of the 
disgust aroused by the tears of another when, logically and 
humanly speaking, he deserves our sympathy. 

And yet I would not withhold my respect for the ‘“‘aus- 
tere’ ideal in one who confines his austerity to himself. 
One must freely admire the man who, with a sensitive ap- 
preciation of the many sides of life, resolutely puts aside 
even most of its satisfactions on behalf of what his imagina- 
tion presents to him as a great end. Some such resolute- 
ness of choice must doubtless be a part of any moral life. 
We may question his valuation as we may question any 
other valuation of life. But if a man chooses to be austere 
with himself it is his right, and it may be his salvation. 
Yet this only means that it takes all kinds to make a moral 
world, and that the austere choice is one among others. 
And I fancy that he for whom it has been a choice, and not 
merely the result of insensitiveness, will be very slow to 
condemn those who have chosen differently. In any case, 
it seems that the austere-and-forbidding ideal conceals 
somewhere a contradiction. When it becomes possible to 
say (as I have often heard), ‘Well, he’s not just what you 
would call a moral person, but’”—but -something rather 
more distinctively humane—the idea of the moral person 
must be out of joint. 

Among the modern prophets of authoritative and austere 
morality the greatest perhaps is Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle’s 
moral ideal is the strong man, or “hero”. His heroes, of 
whom Mohammed, Napoleon, Cromwell, and Frederick 


68 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


the Great are conspicuous examples, are seemingly men 
who do things without asking questions; even the shrewd 
and benevolent Abbot Samson, pictured so persuasively in 
“Past and Present’, was not much given to taking counsel. 
Like Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Carlyle believes that 
those who know should tell the others what to do and make 
them do it; and for him this is the gospel of duty. Ina 
passage levelled anonymously, but obviously, at Carlyle, 
Herbert Spencer proposes an alternative explanation. The 
passage is too full of interesting implications not to be given 
in full: 


“Tt is curious to see how the devil-worship of the savage, surviving 
in various disguises among the civilized, and leaving as one of its 
products that asceticism which in many forms and degrees still pre- 
vails widely, is to be found influencing in marked ways men who 
have apparently emancipated themselves, not only from primitive 
superstitions, but from more developed superstitions. Views of life 
and of conduct which originated with those who propitiated deified 
ancestors by self-tortures enter even still into the ethical theories of 
many persons who have years since cast away the theology of the past, 
and suppose themselves to be no longer influenced by it. 

In the writings of one who rejects dogmatic Christianity, together 
with the Hebrew cult which preceded it, a career of conquest costing 
tens of thousands of lives is narrated with a sympathy comparable to 
that rejoicing which the Hebrew traditions show us over the destruc- 
tion of enemies in the name of God. You may find, too, a delight 
in contemplating the exercise of despotic power, joined with insis- 
tence upon the salutariness of a state in which the wills of slaves and 
citizens are humbly subject to the wills of masters and rulers—a 
sentiment reminding us of that ancient Oriental life which the bib- 
lical narratives portray.” ® 


I do not offer this as a final analysis of Carlyle. But 
to me his “delight in contemplating the exercise of despotic 
power” is unmistakable, along with his appreciation of its 

3 Data of Ethics, Chapter III, Sec. 15. 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 69 


“salutariness’. What shall we say, then, of the cult of 
the strong man? What of those who, today as ever, are 
thirsting for an exhibition of power; of those who would 
see “the masses” “taught to obey’, “know their place’, 
“stop this democratic nonsense’’, “go to work and keep 
their mouths shut”? Such recommendations are commonly 
presented, if not in the name of God, at least on behalf of 
an austere ideal of duty. For my own part, I prefer Spen- 
cer’s interpretation: ‘“‘devil-worship”’. 


$18 


Morality I have defined broadly as the self-conscious 
living of life. Under this conception morality is criticism 
of authority rather than deference to authority, and choice 
rather than duty. The moral situation is not the situation 
of the child under the direction of his parents, for whom 
the only moral question is whether to obey or to disobey; 
nor that of the soldier under orders, for whom there is no 
question; but rather the situation of one confronted with 
the various possibilities of life, who is to choose, to ap- 
propriate—rather, to create out of this situation what he 
conceives to be best—and best from his own point of view. 
Morality according to this view is not training. ‘Moral 
training” indeed is a contradiction in terms. Animals are 
trained; moral agents are at best educated and enlightened. 
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he 
is old he will not depart from it”—if he fails to develop 
morally. Otherwise it will be strange if his way shows no 
departure from his training. 

The essence of morality, in brief, is responsibility; and 
responsibility implies freedom of choice. The docile child, 
who obeys his parents, is indeed a convenient member of the 


70 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


household, but not yet arrived at morality. His morality 
begins when, at the cost of disobedience, it occurs to him to 
do what he himself thinks best. The soldier who blindly 
obeys orders has renounced morality by giving a moral 
power of attorney to his superior officer. This is not to say 
that the child is moral because he disobeys. He is moral so 
far as he aims to do what he thinks best—according to ideas 
of his own. It is very inconvenient when children, or other 
persons under authority, develop “ideas”. This I .would 
not merely admit (even feelingly), but emphasize, in order 
to bring out clearly the difference between inconvenience 
and immorality. For to have ideas of one’s own, however 
inconvenient to others, is a sure sign of morality. 

Some time ago an essay appeared in which the writer 
condemned the moral laxity of our age, as evidenced es- 
pecially in the frank appeal to sex which our young girls 
are said to make in their style of dress and manner of 
dancing. The question was asked, What are we to do 
about it? And the answer was, It is nonsense to appeal to 
self-respect; we must put the fear of God into them. I 
have no doubt that the advice is good from the standpoint 
of social convenience, of their convenience at least whose 
sensibilities are offended. One need not question the utility 
of “the fear of God” as a preservative of social order, if 
only it can be sustained. My criticism would be that the 
result thus attained would be in no sense a moral result. 
It would be, not morality, but, in Spencer’s phrase, “devil- 
worship”. And it would reduce our young women, al- 
though then modest, well-behaved, and pleasing to contem- 
plate, to the moral status of the dog on the street who gives 
me a comfortably wide berth as I pass him, not from in- 
nate courtesy, but from “the fear of God”. The result 


BHEOMOTIVE OF AUTHORITY Ti 


would be moral only so far as the desired reform in dress 
or manners, from whatever source inspired, were the ex- 
pression, on the part of the young women in question, of 
their own moral taste, their own sense of good and bad. 

But when this proviso is included it is not so certain 
that a genuinely moral reform will take the direction an- 
ticipated by the reformers. Genuine morality cannot be 
predetermined. This I repeat here because it has been a 
favorite avocation of moralists, from Aristotle down, to 
work out demonstrations of the ultimate identity of virtue 
and happiness, duty and pleasure, law and freedom, author- 
ity and choice. My son, says the moralist, I impose upon 
you the duty of acting freely, but I warn you that true free- 
dom will only confirm the wisdom of the law. If freedom 
did thus justify authority the fact would be miraculous. 
If further experience of life revealed nothing more of the 
meaning of life morality would be an illusion. Sex- 
morality, for example. In the matter of sex-relations our 
ancestors of a few generations ago could quite confidently 
lay down the law. Today nearly all that we can say is 
that, from the standpoint of morality, sex-relations are 
perilously significant, and critically balanced between all 
that is best and all that is worst in human life. The decay 
of decency I suspect to be illusory. One may not doubt 
that youthful extravagance is dangerous—as life is dan- 
gerous; or that “the experience of mankind” has important 
warnings to utter. Alas for those who ignore them! But 
it seems to me that here least of all may one venture to 
predict the law. 

The supreme justification of authority is embodied, as 
I have noted above, in the idea of God the Creator. In 
this conception it is assumed that in the power that creates 


72 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


the universe, including man himself, we have at last sur- 
mounted the elsewhere impassable barrier which hinders 
might from passing over into right; and that creatorship, 
at least, imposes upon the creature an obligation that is 
absolute. Now I shall say nothing here about the exist- 
ence of God. Granting the existence of God, it still re- 
mains to ask whether the relation of God to man is 
a relation of authority. And I leave in the background 
the question whether a moral agent can conceivably be 
created. Here I will suggest only that a moral agent can 
be under no bond of authority even to his creator. 

The problem of creative authority is the subject of that 
profoundly suggestive drama contained in the third chapter 
of Genesis. Here we have a picture of the Creator dealing 
with his creatures. The creatures have eaten of the tree 
of knowledge. They have become moral agents. And 
thus they have profoundly disturbed the economy of God’s 
creation—it is no wonder that the older theologians dated 
all the tragedy of life from the “Fall of Man”. Hitherto 
the creatures have been obedient, but they have not been ¢ 
moral—not a bit more so than the other creatures in the 
Garden. Now indeed they are moral and they disobey. 
And to those who have learned to disobey, whether animals 
or men, the argument from authority has ceased to be 
relevant. From now on they must be controlled, if at all, 
by an appeal to their interests. The Creator may indeed 
make use of his power and bend them to his will by the 
hope of reward and the fear of punishment. Even so he 
will be dispensing not commands but inducements. And 
—though it be the infinite power of the Almighty—the 
creatures, having eaten of the tree of knowledge, may still 
conceivably reject the rewards and accept the punishments. 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 73 


They too have become almighty in their power to choose, 
and to choose to suffer. 

Such, it seems to me, is the inescapable logic of the situa- 
tion—which, by the way, is more or less the situation of 
every parent or teacher. Picture yourself as a creator. So 
long as you create machines they will obey you implicitly, 
according to the measure of your creative power. But sup- 
pose you create (and suppose that you can) persons having 
the capacity of judgment and choice: ipso facto they are 
forever emancipated from your control, and your relation 
to them, whatever it be, will not be a relation of authority. 


§ 19 


But the sentiment of reverence? For the possibility of 
reverence, it is popularly supposed, depends upon “rever- 
ence for authority”. Well, I believe that I am voicing the 
sentiment of reverence. I take it to be a characteristic mark 
of insight in James Martineau that he puts the sentiment 
of reverence at the top of his elaborate and complicated 
scale of “springs of action”; and I also subscribe to that 
alternative statement of Kant’s principle (fundamentally 
in opposition to his authoritarian prepossessions) in which 
he bids us treat other persons always as ends in themselves, 
never as means for alien ends; in other words, to respect 
the souls of our fellows—something which “authority” 
seems unable to grasp. But how to suggest in brief or in 
broader compass all that is involved in the sentiment of 
reverence, is somewhat beyond my power. Wonder, curi- 
osity, yet also critical inquiry and a sense of the paradoxi- 
cal and the humorous—if reverence be a sentiment, and 
not a blind propension, I should say that it involves at 
least all of these. Reverence is indeed the necessary impli- 


74 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


cation of humane intelligence; that is, of imagination. Or, 
going further back, the germ of reverence is contained in 
Aristotle’s “‘all men desire by nature to know.” For the 
desire to know is the desire for the enhancement of life; the 
outreaching of imagination towards the unknown distant; 
the desire for the enlargement of my own life through the 
appropriation of the experience of life of other beings, and 
of all being. And thus in its more intensive form quite 
remote from “‘idle curiosity”. Curiosity about your neigh- 
bor’s household affairs is idle indeed, but especially char- 
acteristic of those who are lacking both in imagination and 
in reverence. But the imagination which makes you won- 
der deeply about your neighbor’s soul, about how life feels 
and seems to him, is respectful and reverent. 

Putting it more academically, I should say that reverence 
is the belief in significance and the search for significance. 
It is reverence to thirst to understand what goes on behind 
the countless faces that pass us day by day, and to believe 
that something does go on there; and it is lack of reverence 
—at least an assertion that reverence is unmeaning—to be- 
lieve that nothing of any consequence goes on there. And 
it is the culmination of reverence—if only you can carry 
the assumption of reverence thus far—to believe that some- 
thing significant goes on behind the face of nature and, 
with scientists, philosophers, and poets, to struggle to grasp 
that significance. ‘This is reverence for the divine. 

But not, as I conceive, reverence for authority. I have 
suggested above that the idea of the fatherhood of God im- 
ples a moral relation, and thus a moral obligation, while 
the idea of God the Creator implies, in itself, no obligation. 
But the fatherhood of God, while implying reverence, con- 
tains no implications of authority. In the human relation 


THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY 75 


of parent and child I believe indeed in the exercise of 
authority, especially in dealing with younger children; not, 
however, on behalf of their moral character, but as a sim- 
ple household necessity, which may on occasion be a life- 
and-death necessity. But here the parental authority is 
simply the filial fear. Reverence for the parent—the moral 
relation between parent and child—begins with the child’s 
perception that the parent is his best friend and a person 
worthy of confidence and trust, a loyal help in difficulty, 
and a satisfying source of enlightenment in perplexity. But 
this sense of confidence involves no obligation to obey. 
Nay, the very fact of confidence means that the obligation 
has been thus far already loosened. 

It is not different with reverence for God. We have to 
remember that, true or false, the idea of God is logically 
and necessarily the imaginative development of ideals of 
human character and of human relationships. Let us ad- 
mit that Jahveh, the god of Israel, was the expression of 
a sublime reverence. It is still true that he represented the 
characteristic Israelitish vices of jealousy and vindictive 
hatred. So that a pathetically beautiful appeal beginning 
with, “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me” 
may be followed a few verses later by, ‘‘Do I not hate them, 
O Lord, that hate thee?” The Greeks likewise attributed 
their own vices to their gods, making them crafty politicians 
and free livers. The Greeks were not much afraid of their 
gods; but it is no less true, I should say, that the Greek 
mythology, the fruit of an imagination graceful, curious, 
wistful, was the expression of reverence. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE ORDERED SOCIETY 


§ 20. The order of reverence. § 21. The utility of the reverential 
order. § 22. The ordered society and the biological species. § 23. 
Ordered relations vs. social relations. § 24. The decay of reverence 
and the dawn of morality. 


§ 20 


COME now to the motive of authority as embodied in 

the conception of social order. The characteristic 

phrase for this motive is ‘reverence for authority”, or 
“respect for the constituted authorities”; to which the cor- 
responding diagnosis for all social maladjustments is “the 
decay of reverence’. ‘The metaphysical development of the 
motive of reverence may be found in “The Philosophical 
Theory of the State”, by the late Bernard Bosanquet. 

It is, I suppose, an indisputable fact that every child is 
born with a determinate potential complexion—say, with 
red hair or black. For Bosanquet it seems to be a fact 
equally indisputable (and in the last analysis a necessity 
of the same organic kind) that every child bears at birth 
the mark of a determinate social class. And therefore it is 
axiomatic for Bosanquet that the only conceivable social 
relation is an arrangement of men in classes; which are to 
be distinguished (as every logic of social classification 
seems to demand) as higher and lower, and bound together 
in a system of reverence for authority. This view of the 


logical necessities seems to be also axiomatic for many 
76 


THE ORDERED SOCIETY he 


other persons; among them (including, strangely, some of 
the more advanced exponents of democracy) those for 
whom the social problem is a problem of “leadership”— 
as if the only conceivable social order were an order of 
leaders and followers. We have heard much about leader- 
ship since the War. But true reverence for authority is 
expressed in the recognition of “natural” or ‘right leaders’’, 
to be found only among “‘the intelligent classes’’, the dis- 
tinction of classes being referred to the Laws of Nature. 

And for a true sentiment of reverence a society thus 
ordered is the embodiment also of an aesthetic ideal. The 
ordered society is a thing of beauty; beautiful because in 
the last analysis its beauty is the beauty of Nature. Per- 
haps it would be better to say that the ordered society is 
picturesque. Society is made picturesque by the presence 
of distinctions; and distinctions seem to require that men 
be graded. The ordered society is again conceived as a 
society distinctively and exclusively moral. Ideally it 
seems that there can be neither beauty nor virtue in the 
relations of men except in a relation of superior and infe- 
rior in which benevolence is exchanged for reverence. 

The ideally “ordered” society is, accordingly, a society 
patriarchally or hierarchically ordered, in which men are 
graded, and ranked, according to a single principle of 
worth. The type of all such is the society pictured in 
Plato’s “Republic” (presented as the social ideal both by 
Bosanquet and by T. H. Green), in which a broad distinc- 
tion is made between a lower class of common-minded 
men, or artisans, and an upper class of high-minded men, 
or warriors, the whole being guided and directed by a select, 
uppermost class of philosophers and (in the language of a 
later period) saints. A more familiar illustration, how- 


78 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ever, is the picture of English country life presented by the 
literature of the earlier Victorian period, in which society 
consists of an upper class of landed gentry, an inter- 
mediate class of tenant-farmers, with whom are grouped 
some yeomen, or freeholders, and a lower class of farm- 
laborers, all bound together by the feudal principle of 
mutual loyalty. The tenant was bound in loyalty to his 
landlord—woe to the tenant who should vote against his 
landlord! But the landlord was bound to the tenant; and 
especially bound to respect his first right to a lease of the 
farm which had been held by him and by his fathers be- 
fore him. 

The moral principle governing these relations is the 
principle defended in F. H. Bradley’s essay on “My Sta- 
tion and Its Duties’”.* According to this principle the 
whole duty of each man consists in faithfulness to that 
station in life to which it hath pleased God to call him. 
The duties flowing from this principle are substantially 
those tabulated in the church catechism under the several 
heads of “my duty to my superiors’, “to my equals”, and 
“to my inferiors”. In this moral system it was at once the 
virtue and the pride of any man that he “knew his place”. 
By this indeed he vindicated his claim to self-respect. 
For the matter of that, it would seem that the two motives 
of self-respect and respect for superiors were interwoven in 
a mutual understanding which becomes at times almost 
democratic. Squire and tenant-farmer might be warm 
friends and even good fellows; but the tenant never aspired 
to dine at the squire’s table, and he condemned as vulgar 
those of his fellow-tenants who cherished such aspirations. 

On the other hand, it seems that for those who lay out- 

1F, H. Bradley, Ethical Studies. 


THE ORDERED SOCIETY 79 


side of the system, such as the village shopkeeper, a truly 
sound morality was out of the question. Honest Hodge, 
the farm-laborer, achieves dignity by removing his cap in 
the presence of the squire; Dawkins, the shopkeeper, 
achieves only servility. The commercial, or calculating, 
motive could offer doubtless only a hypocritical respect for 
authority. or this, in the end, was the principle under- 
lying the system, not respect for the person but respect for 
his rank, and respect for the principle of distinctions in- 
volved in the ordered society. Respect for one’s betters 
and condescension to inferiors were the two signs by which, 
according to circumstances, one indicated a belief in the 
moral order. 

This tradition of reverence survives to trouble us, in 
a society supposedly emancipated, as an element in the 
servant question and the labor problem. As for the first, 
I will not be so rash as to suggest that the need of personal 
or household service, for many persons a truly vital need, 
can very easily be reduced to a “business proposition”’. 
It is none the less the question of status, the question of a 
“proper respect”, that presents the greatest difficulty. 
Mrs. Brown, a lady of liberal tendencies, and a matter-of- 
fact person, will have you believe perhaps that all that 
interests her is so much work for so much money. But 
she addresses her cook as ‘‘Mary’’, and she would be 
stunned if the cook should address her as ‘‘Emily”. She 
is also slow to abandon her traditional prerogative of su- 
pervising, on behalf of morality, the cook’s goings-out and 
her comings-in; and especially her relations with young 
men. And when in consequence Mary the cook prefers a 
place in a shop or a factory, probably a more grinding 
task and on the whole less lucrative, Mrs. Brown will begin 


80 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


to wonder whether these persons know what is good for 
them. 

It is true that Mrs. Brown and her friends, finding them- 
selves in the position of Mary (which, however, cannot 
politely be suggested), would feel in honor bound to prefer 
the shop or even the factory to menial service, or possibly 
to starve on something lower than shop wages in an occupa- 
tion conventionally more genteel; and those hardships 
which make it a foolish choice for Mary would for them 
make it heroic. But their case, they would explain, if 
brought to the point, is different. And if you ask, How 
different? the answer, I fancy, would boil down to this: 
that God in his wisdom has created different sorts of 
persons for different stations in life; to most of whom, ap- 
propriately, a servile occupation is not really objectionable. 
Mrs. Brown and her friends would probably claim to be 
Christian women. They would be dismayed to learn that 
they are following Aristotle, the heathen philosopher, who 
taught that some men are by nature slaves. 

It may be supposed that the husbands of these ladies— 
business men, captains of industry, entrepreneurs, as the 
economist calls them—are untroubled by any of this non- 
sense about the proprieties. As men of hard fact, their 
imagination is supposed never to be deflected by sentiment 
from the line marked by the arithmetical balance of profit 
and loss. And Mr. Brown would tell you perhaps that as 
long as he receives a sufficient return for wages paid, moral 
considerations have no interest for him. But he has prob- 
ably failed to grasp the full connotation of the term 
“moral”. In England, I believe, the entrepreneurs are 
still distinguished as “masters” from the workmen as 
“servants”. In the United States we prefer the politer 


THE ORDERED SOCIETY 81 


“employer” and “employee”. But the tradition is the 
same; the tradition, namely, of respect for authority. 
The employee is supposed to remove his hat in the presence 
of the employer. ‘The employer keeps his hat on, and his 
cigar in his mouth, and it is he who is supposed to fix the 
conditions of employment. Since the business belongs to 
him, the relation is in no sense a partnership. 

Until recently labor disputes referred mainly to wages. 
Now, however, it seems that the question of wages is over- 
shadowed by the demand of labor for a share, amounting 
possibly to the lion’s share, in the management of industry. 
At the same time, the editorial columns of the daily press 
have begun to issue solemn warnings to the labor world of 
its obligations to “the public”. Formerly it was assumed 
that responsibility to the public, if any, was assumed by 
employers alone. Yet it seems that ‘“‘the public” is as 
little disposed as the employers to favor the participation 
of labor in the direction of industry. Apparently it does 
not occur to these journalistic moralists that moral respon- 
sibility and moral obligation imply a power of direction. 
Obligation without choice, the precise negative of moral 
obligation, is indeed the principle of authoritarian morality 
generally. 

Now if I were a stock-holder, say, in a railway enterprise, 
I am not sure that I should be eager for a partnership 
with labor; nor should I be in a hurry to advocate this 
from the standpoint of the public. But this attitude I 
should call utilitarian rather than moral. And what it 
means is substantially this: JI know from experience that 
the entrepreneurs can in some fashion run the railways, 
provide transportation, and earn dividends; and I prefer 
to get things done, or to collect dividends, with as little 


82 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


discussion as possible. I may have before me the vision 
of a much more humane and intelligent situation, which 
eventually may also be more profitable from the utilitarian 
standpoint. But the process of realizing this situation will 
involve mental and moral effort, including much thought, 
perplexity, and doubt. In brief, it is an invitation to a 
higher degree of moral responsibility than, in this direction 
at least, I care now to assume. 

On the other hand, as a representative of railway labor, 
I should certainly refuse to recognize any responsibility 
to the public until the public co-operated in securing for 
me a commensurate power of supervision. If asked to ac- 
cept a reduction of wages on the ground that rates are too 
high for the public to bear, I should wish to be shown 
whether rates might not be lowered through greater 
economy of management. And the entrepreneurs, Mr. 
Brown and his friends, if placed in the same position, 
would call this a plain business proposition. Nay, more 
—a moral proposition. For it is precisely their argument 
when they point to the Labor Board and the Interstate 
Commerce Commission as preventing them from fulfilling 
a moral obligation to the public. 

From the terms in which the discussion of labor 
problems is commonly conducted moral considerations of 
any intelligent kind seem rather speculatively remote. Yet 
it is worth asking what the moral issue might be. The 
cruder form of the labor argument, which is suspicious of 
the value or productiveness of any work not done with the 
hands, prefers to ban the whole class of entrepreneurs and 
capitalists as ‘‘parasites”’, at least to the extent of receiving 
much more than their services warrant. On the other 
hand, the entrepreneur claims for himself the dignity and 


THE ORDERED SOGIETY 83 


the authority of intelligence. He represents the traditional 
“intelligent classes”. And in vindication of his intelli- 
gence he claims further that it is by virtue of his organizing 
ability that industry exists. One wonders, then, why so 
little attempt is made by either side to test this claim by 
experiment. Labor seems as little disposed to assume 
responsibility as capital is to grant it. My suspicion is 
that each fears the other may be right. 

Meanwhile, some light may be thrown upon the superior 
rights and dignities of the employer by considering the 
relation of employer and employee as a relation of ex- 
change. ‘The laborer gives work in exchange for money; 
the employer gives money in exchange for labor. In a fair 
exchange the values are presumably equal. Why, then, 
is the employer entitled to deference? Because he provides 
the intelligence or because he provides the money? ‘There 
are curious superstitions connected with money. The 
neighbor who borrows my lawnmower without asking my 
permission is perhaps somewhat impudent but nothing 
worse. But what if he borrowed the price of the lawn- 
mower out of my pocket-book? When I pay for the hat 
that I have just bought, the salesman says, “Thank you”; 
if I should thank him for letting me have the hat he would 
be very much amused. I have observed a substantial shop- 
keeper still obsequiously polite to his customer though a 
negro servant who was probably parting with nearly her 
last dollar—and she, in turn, was exercising upon him all 
of the dignity that goes with the disbursement of money. 
Though there is no reason underlying the dignity of money, 
there is a simple cause. Money is a liquid asset. If you 
have only goods to barter with, you are at the mercy of 
the relatively few who happen to need your special goods. 


84 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


But everybody wants your money. Thus money is power. 
Under present conditions it is the most conspicuous and 
characteristic form of power. And power is “the basis of 
authority”. Among those who reverence authority one 
rarely observes any long-sustained reverence for persons 
who are powerless. 


§ 21 


Turning, then, to the moral quality of the ordered 
society I need only repeat here with a difference of applica- 
tion what was said in the last chapter: the ordered society 
is not so much a moral ideal as an ideal of convenience. 
The motive underlying it is not reverence, but utility. 
And yet, more exactly, not so much utility, in any more 
comprehensive sense, as business efficiency. For the two 
things are by no means the same. One may seriously 
doubt whether our modern business organization stands 
for a very high grade of utility, even from its own ostensible 
point of view of productiveness. Employers themselves 
see clearly enough that productiveness is not enhanced 
when most of the army of workers have little personal in- 
terest and no personal voice in the process of production; 
and while productiveness is being constantly increased by 
labor-saving machinery, it seems that the skilled artisan 
is becoming steadily and deliberately less productive. 
Meanwhile, however, the present form of business organi- 
zation does “‘get things done”. ‘This is the true meaning 
of “efficiency”; a motive by no means contemptible indeed, 
but in no large sense moral or suggestive of reverence. 
Efficiency is short-time utility. Its aim is to get things 
done, not with a large and artistic completeness—so as to 
satisfy indefinitely—but first of all promptly, so that the 


Dae ORDERED SOG1ET VY 85 


business may be disposed of and the world may go on. 

For purposes of efficiency the hierarchical order is per- 
haps ideal. In any emergency—and the housewife who 
knows that dinner must be provided whatever happens, 
will tell us that emergency confronts us day by day—in 
the case of a fire or a flood, however, what we need first 
of all is a leader whose instructions all will obey; and any 
leader, any organization, is better than none. Hence the 
hierarchical order is not merely ‘‘mediaeval”. The finest 
and most logical embodiments of the ordered society are 
extremely modern and up-to-date; as illustrated in our 
large industrial organizations, but best of all in the organi- 
zation of a great railway system with its elaborate hierarchy 
of president, several vice-presidents, superintendents, yard- 
masters, train-masters, and soon. But the ideal of course 
is the army, the purpose of which is to get things done 
though the heavens fall. 

In the army, under conditions of ideal military obedi- 
ence, all of the morality in the situation les within the 
breast of the commander-in-chief—if, of course, we define 
morality as the self-conscious living of life. The private 
soldier is as far removed from the morality of the situa- 
tion as the mechanism of the guns. But the order of 
reverence is better illustrated by the economy of life on the 
old-fashioned farm. There was first the farmer himself, 
the supreme authority; then his wife who (under the older 
theory at least) obeyed him in all things; the children, 
who obeyed their parents; the horses and the dogs trained 
to obey all the family; and finally the cattle, pigs, and 
chickens, taught to fear if not very definitely to obey. 
In this picture we have an extended reverential series— 
in which the reverence varies inversely as the morality. 


86 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


If we then carry the picture back to the days of the patri- 
archs we shall understand the poetic attraction of the order 
of reverence—and see that reverence for superiors implies 
the point of view of primitive man. 


§ 22 


This primitive conception of life has been fortified 
within two generations by the introduction of the concep- 
tion of evolution, bringing with it a biological philosophy 
which carries human society back to the status of the 
animal species. It has been the custom of natural 
scientists to represent the progress of science as an emanci- 
pation from superstition; in which the fear of natural 
powers and forces is replaced by freedom of choice; in 
which also nature, formerly dictating and enforcing the 
ends of our lives, becomes the means for ends of our own. 
According to this view of the function of science, one might 
suppose that the laws of heredity (assuming them to be 
discoverable) would serve chiefly to afford each of us a 
wider range of enlightenment in the choice of a husband 
or a wife; and it might be assumed also that the possibility 
of controlling reproduction would be welcomed as affording 
individual men and women a larger control over the de- 
termining conditions of their lives. The effect of the 
biclogical view has been rather to reinstate a superstitious 
reverence for “Nature”. Programs of eugenics betray at 
best little regard for human relations; just as little indeed, 
in their more resolutely scientific proposals, as the stock- 
breeder shows for the personal choices of his animals. 
Not our own ends, the biologist tells us, but the ends of 
Nature, that is, of ‘the species”; on whose behalf biolo- 
gists and physicians are not infrequently to be found 


THE ORDERED SOCIETY 87 


among the enemies of birth-control; or at least in the atti- 
tude of claiming authority to dictate on behalf of the 
species the ends for which birth is to be controlled. 

One of the significant fruits of the biological point of 
view is the prominence now given to the sex-relation as 
a topic for literature and for polite conversation, in strik- 
ing contrast to the reticence of Victorian days. For my 
own part, I believe that frankness in such matters is on 
the side of decency; but I also cherish the conviction that 
the principle of sex-morality is reverence for what is per- 
haps the most deeply intimate of personal relations. To 
this view biology can hardly be said to contribute. Biology 
seeks rather to convince us that as animals our chief func- 
tion in life is breeding; and it then sets up as the moral 
ideal a conception of “good breeding” all its own. It is 
true that biology has helped to make breeding conscien- 
tious; on the other hand it has helped to check the de- 
velopment of a humane attitude towards differences of 
race and towards personal peculiarities and deformities. 
Under the biological régime it has become a definitive 
condemnation of a man to call him “abnormal”. The 
result is that sympathy and imagination are deprecated, 
while race repulsions and the animal repugnance to the 
abnormal are exalted as wise provisions of Nature for 
preserving the purity of the species. 

In the early chapters of Genesis we are presented with 
a picture of the Garden of the Lord. It is not an un- 
pleasing picture, in spite of the fact that it assigns to the 
man and the woman the moral status of only the most 
favored among the favorite animals. The biological point 
of view has extended the Garden of the Lord to cover the 
earth and transformed it into the Lord God’s stock-farm. 


88 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


Those who are disposed to question this motif should 
remember that Darwin got his clew to natural selection 
from the procedure of stock-breeding—and they may also 
recall Plato’s appeal, in the fifth book of “The Republic”, 
to the principles employed in the breeding of sporting dogs 
and game birds. This conception of the divine stock- 
farm, in which we are bred for purposes not our own, is 
the finally scientific and up-to-date development of the ideal 
of the ordered society. 


S803 


As the alternative to the ordered society I will venture 
here only very briefly to suggest the motive implied in a 
moral society, having dealt with the subject at length in 
another volume. If the motive of the ordered society is 
business efficiency, the motive of the moral society is 
“leisure”; or, if you please, “humanity”. The moral 
society, in other words, is not an organization of workers 
and business men, but a society of gentlemen. ‘This, 
however, is not to suggest a class-distinction. We are all 
in some degree business men, and all of us—those of us 
at least who indulge in moral philosophy—are likewise 
gentlemen. ‘Leisure’ is that part of a man’s life which 
remains after he has made the sacrifice to efficiency. 
What is chiefly then to be noted is the change which comes 
over the motives, and over the whole view of life, of any 
man as he leaves his office or workshop and goes into his 
home or into “society”. He has just been engaged in the 
practice of efficiency, doubtless with scant respect for the 
dignity of persons. In the world of leisure he is faced 
with the dignity of persons as the theoretically accepted 


4 Individualism, 1911. 


THELORDERED SOCTE TY 89 


principle. In his office he has been perhaps an authority; 
in any social gathering—at a dinner-party, for example— 
let him be a person never so important, he is just as much 
and just as little of an authority as any one else. Nor 
may it be said that the host and hostess are now the au- 
thorities; although they occupy commonly the two ends of 
the table it is not for the purpose of preserving order. 

In brief, there is no “social system’. ‘‘System’’, we may 
see now, is abhorrent to the motive of the social. Anda 
“social organization” is a plain contradiction in terms. 
Bosanquet will have it that a man is not a man except as 
he is a member of ‘“‘organized society’; what I would point 
out is that he is not a man except as he is more than a 
member of an organization. ‘To see the contradiction, 
compare a group of four men who meet once a week, with 
no hard and fast engagement, to play a game of bridge, 
and a similar group of twenty-five or thirty. The latter 
can hardly be maintained without organization. But it 
will be noted that just so far as the element of organiza- 
tion enters the situation the social element departs. A 
“social glass’, or cup of tea, is properly named; to call 
the income-tax a ‘‘social institution” is misplaced senti- 
ment. 

Yet there is order, even within the group of four; an 
order sustained, not by any form of authority, but by 
mutual understanding. And there are, if you please, dis- 
tinctions: just those intensively personal distinctions in- 
deed, eluding all attempts to standardize them, which 
constitute the essence of a relation distinctively social. 
And I suppose that every one “has his place” (if that be 
important) in the regard and respect of his fellows. It is 
not, however, “‘that station in life to which it hath pleased 


90 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


God to call him’’, but inevitably the station that he is able 
to win by his talents and to demonstrate as his own by the 
force of his personality. 

Nor may it be said that the world of leisure is an in- 
active or unproductive world. But in this world things 
have to be done with a careful regard for the rights and 
the tastes of those doing them; and the operating method 
is not the method of command and obey, but the method 
of co-operation by agreement. And the principle of agree- 
ment is the principle of mutual understanding with regard 
to taste and convenience—not mutual self-sacrifice, but 
that artistic completeness of convenience, rendering full 
justice to each, which, though never absolutely attainable, 
becomes ever more nearly attainable as men come to a 
truly personal understanding with one another. 

The practical moral problem—the problem both moral 
and practical—is then to import these humanly social re- 
lations into the conduct of men in business, so as to trans- 
form—without loss of efficiency, perhaps even with an 
eventual increase of efficiency—the world of business into 
a moral world. How far this can be done, how im- 
mediately in any given case, need not concern us here. 
What I would point out is that any such problem is faced 
with at least an immediate issue between the human con- 
siderations and the business considerations. To get things 
done is one consideration, to get them morally done is 
quite another. In this issue the ideal of the ordered society 
stands not for humanity but for utility. 


§ 24 


Morality, I have said, is the self-conscious living of life. 
From this point of view it is an advance in morality when 


THE ORDER BD SO GI1ET VY 91 


men learn to choose what they will do, and to insist upon 
choosing, rather than when they “learn to obey the consti- 
tuted authorities”. And in illustration of this I will close 
this chapter with some remarks bearing upon ‘‘the decay of 
reverence’’—which I will put somewhat in the form of a 
fable. It has often occurred to me to speculate upon the 
moral status of the lower animals, and to wonder why 
ethical theories are so seldom tested by reference to our 
attitude towards these, our animal kinsmen. I fear it may 
be because in the background we detect the presence of 
ominous questions.” Some time ago, however, I thought 
of asking, What if the horses and cattle were suddenly 
endowed with self-consciousness and the power of speech? 
Suppose that the draft-horses became aware of what they 
contributed in the economic process, or that the food-cattle 
came to know that they were to be eaten and could tell us 
that they knew? I fear that after a discussion of this 
subject with one of the then cultivated and instructed mem- 
bers of this species, we should find that a good beefsteak 
had lost some of its flavor. On the other hand, I imagine 
that the cattle would flatly refuse to be eaten. It would 
be useless to call Dr. Paley to explain to them out of the 
Bible that God intended them to be food for man; and no 
less useless to dwell upon the superior importance of 
human life as compared with theirs. They, very properly, 
would never see it. If we threatened coercion, they could, 
as a last resort (what we should do in their place), threaten 


2In his Autobiography Anthony Trollope offers an amusingly naive justifica- 
tion of his favorite sport of fox-hunting, based gravely upon a computation 
of the pain suffered by the fox as compared with the pleasure of a hundred 
or two hunters. Trollope forgets that the importance attributed by him to 
the gratification of the hunting-instinct of the hunter places the hunter who 
chases the fox in the same order of nature with the fox who chases the hare— 
and then why bother about morality? The fox does not. 


92 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


race suicide—or possibly immediate, individual suicide. 
Our only recourse would be to treat them as persons worthy 
of consideration, 7.¢., as gentlemen, by offering suitable 
inducements, though what these inducements would be, 
I must leave the reader to imagine. But one point is clear: 
we should be facing a situation distinctively moral, 
confronted with moral agents whose rights, though 
newly created, we could upon no ground venture to 
ignore. 

Well, the significance of the fable is that this is precisely 
the situation confronting ‘“‘the intelligent classes” in the 
present. crisis of social life. ‘The masses’, so called, 
“the workers”, in present-day terms, have just lately (in 
the history of the race) acquired self-consciousness and the 
power of speech. Until yesterday these workers, represent- 
ing numerically all but an insignificant fraction of the race, 
remained inarticulate in moral philosophy and nearly so 
in literature. As pointed out above, all Greek ethics, 
which continues to set the questions for academic ethics, is 
the ethics of a leisure class. Classical literature makes 
us almost forget that, then as now, life was supported by 
work. In ancient literature the worker, usually a slave, 
remains unrepresented except as Christianity voices his 
claim to respect in another world. In the Greek view of 
life he forms a part, not of the moral world, but of the 
natural world, along with the horses and the cattle. All 
of our ideas of higher culture are derived from, and still 
are impregnated with this conception of a social situation 
which involves the distinction of master and servant. So 
that, in spite of the change of ideas brought about by the 
industrial revolution, which makes it now possible to give 


THE ORDERED! SOCIETY 93 


the status of gentleman to a successful business man,* we 
do not yet clearly conceive what a really non-servile higher 
culture would be. 

Meanwhile the industrial revolution, built upon the 
steam-engine, by segregating and massing the workers has 
made them class-conscious. In the utilitarian school of 
ethics we have, for the first time I should say in moral 
philosophy, the expression of an industrial view of life. 
One of the consequences of this view is now being presented 
to the world in emphatic and imperative if also somewhat 
insolent tones (in which, as betraying a sense of power, 
they are not peculiar) by the labor unions; whose leaders 
are proving themselves to be men of no mean intelligence, 
political and administrative. And of late the labor world, 
while not relaxing its demand for wages, has announced a 
claim for participation in the direction of industry. The 
claim is doubtless shocking, but viewed calmly it seems 
that nothing could be more characteristically moral. What 
it means is: personal dignity (dignity in spite of a certain 
concomitant insolence) is asserting the rights of gentlemen. 

Faced with this situation, it is useless to tell them au- 
thoritatively where they belong; precisely from the moral 
standpoint, that remains to be seen. Nor will it avail to 
refer to the superior wisdom of the intelligent classes. 
Alas, I fear that, by the side of many of the labor men, the 
economic philosophy of ‘‘the intelligent classes” is only too 
often naive! And it is rather late in the day for “the 
fear of God”. They have been warned; and it is a 


3 What this means is shown in Mrs. Gaskell’s “North and South”, in which 
that clear-minded woman finds it evidently something of a task to show how 
the daughter of a very poor Anglican clergyman could be conceived to love, 
and honorably to marry, a well-to-do manufacturer, although a graduate of 
Oxford—this, of course, seventy years ago. 


94 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


peculiarity of the moral world that, although you may per- 
haps enlighten the unenlightened, you cannot so well dis- 
enlighten the enlightened. 

How the rights and obligations of the situation are to 
be analysed, how they are to be adjusted, it is not my pur- 
pose to inquire. My interest here lies in the motive and 
conception of morality. Hence it will suffice to point out 
that this assertion of rights on the part of the workers, or 
the masses, so far from marking “the decay of reverence” 
deplored by worshippers of the ordered society, marks a 
significant extension—perhaps the most significant in the 
history of the race—of the territory of the moral world. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT 


§ 25. Morality among the values. § 26. Utility and the system of 
means and ends. 


Sak 


N passing now from what has been mainly a criti- 
cism of the orthodox view to a more positive develop- 
ment of the conception of morality I will begin with 

a brief statement of the psychological thesis, or motive, 
which is to underly all of the subsequent chapters, and 
which may be stated as “the unity of the spirit’’. 

The contrast of morality and utility involves a dis- 
tinction of “‘values’’ which suggests the more recent fashion 
of treating ethics as a branch of “‘value-theory”. Among 
the several values we may distinguish economic value, re- 
lating to wealth, or more generally to utility; aesthetic 
value, relating to art and beauty; ethical, or moral value; 
and logical value, in which knowledge and truth are con- 
ceived as a species of value. The sum of these “values”, 
assumed to be so many different kinds of value, is human 
life. Now among these values what is the place of 
morality? My answer will be, Everywhere. 

To make the meaning of this clearer—it is for me one 
of the convincing merits of Benedetto Croce’s philosophy 
of beauty that he makes the aesthetic a generic aspect of 
the human mind, or in his own juster and more graceful 


terms, of the human spirit. By this it is meant that 
95 


96 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


creative art is not confined to “men of genius’; to excep- 
tional and abnormal men, capable of a special sort of 
intoxication; or to exceptional and abnormal states of 
mind. ‘Since we all talk,” he says, very significantly, 
“we are all artists.’ Any one who has ever attempted to 
talk (or to write) seriously, with a careful sense of 
responsibility for saying what he means, or who has ob- 
served a child struggling pathetically for the fitting word 
and dissatisfied with any other, who has compared this 
with that facile use of slang (in polite conversation or 
commercial correspondence) which is never at a loss and 
never means much, will see, I think, that serious talking 
is an experience both of art and of beauty. But then he 
will see that every experience, so far as it is expertence— 
consciousness and not habit—is as such an aesthetic ex- 
perience and has, in however slight a measure, the quality 
of genius—and thus, I maintain, the quality of morality. 

It is therefore dismaying to find Croce, in a fashion 
characteristically Latin, dividing the realm of the spirit 
into the four seemingly separated ‘“‘forms” of aesthetic, 
logic, economic, and ethic; such that, it seems, nothing 
that is any of these forms, or departments, of the spirit can 
at the same time be in any other. To be sure the four 
forms are somehow linked in “the unity of the spirit’; an 
evolutionary unity in which the spirit, beginning with the 
aesthetic, passes through the logical and the economic and 
reaches finally the ethical. But in this “unity” I find 
the aesthetic and the moral, to me the most intimately 
related, separated by nearly the whole field of the spirit, 
and the aesthetic (curiously, the field in which Croce’s 
chief interests lie) degraded to the status of the most 
primitive form of consciousness. To me this is false 


TEM ke etUN LT vo OE a eb) SPIRIT 97 


aesthetic and false ethic; and I am led to suspect that 
Croce, who is a free spirit in the field of aesthetic, has in 
the field of ethics bowed to a pious convention—the con- 
vention, namely, that while art is self-expression morality 
expresses “the spirit of self-sacrifice’; that while art is 
individual morality must be “universal”. 

But my chief objection to these nicely differentiated 
“forms of the spirit” is that they perpetuate the tradition 
of the departmented soul; the soul conceived after the 
analogy of the house, or the factory, in which successive 
stages in the process of manufacture are distributed 
spatially among so many rooms, or buildings. The classi- 
cal illustration is what James calls “the Kantian machine- 
shop”, from which we derive the tripartite division of the 
soul into knowledge, feeling, and will; three rooms, in the 
first of which we find out what the world has given us 
(without yet suspecting what we want), in the second 
how we like it (without suspecting what we shall do 
about it), and in the third what we are going to do about 
it. Primitive conceptions of this kind will be found 
underlying most of the chapter-divisions in the textbooks 
of psychology. They doubtless enable us to talk about the 
mind, they hardly enable us to understand it. 

Such at least is my prejudice: namely, that the depart- 
mented soul is no soul whatever. And therefore I must 
view somewhat sceptically the multiplicity of separate 
fields, each guarded by its own standard as by a tutelary 
deity, into which life, or ‘“‘value’’, is divided by science and 
by common thought. A shopkeeper tells me that this is 
the right price. If I ask whether he means that the price 
is moral, I shall learn that prices are determined not by 
moral laws but by the laws of economics. A teacher of 


98 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


French tells me that “Sapho” and ‘Mademoiselle Maupin” 
are good literature, but hastens to explain that he means, 
not morally good, but aesthetically good. If I criticize 
Jones who has just lost his son for his choice of physician, 
I may be reminded that his fault was at most an error of 
judgment, and thus not moral but intellectual. Or (to 
introduce the traditionally most absolute division of moral 
philosophy) his fault was merely prudential—as if there 
could be a “merely prudential” in an issue of life and 
death! Other standards might be mentioned, such as the 
standards of manners (assumed to be independent of 
morals) and of correct dress. 

In this common view morality appears to be only one of 
the many departments of life. And in the mind of the 
average man it seems to be somewhat apart from life’s 
main business. The business man dismisses moral con- 
siderations on the ground that “business is business”, calmly 
certain that morality belongs somewhere else. For the artist 
art is art. The statesman is convinced that morality 
should not obtrude upon diplomacy. He may even take 
pride in the reflection that he has allowed no moral scruples 
(all very well in their place) to qualify his pursuit of 
the national prestige. It seems indeed that among the 
departments of life morality is the least important. So 
that the common man may be forgiven for supposing that 
morality comes into play only on Sunday, that it is con- 
cerned mainly with domestic relations, and perhaps ex- 
clusively with the relations between men and women. 

It is against this departmental view of life (common 
indeed but far from distinctively vulgar) that I hold that 
among the several “values” of life morality is everywhere. 


THRU NLLY OF SHESSPIRIT 99 


A Crocean released from the orthodox convention might 
prefer to say that beauty is everywhere. I could meet him 
more than half way. My own starting point is morality; 
and I am interested in vindicating the moral quality of 
every movement of the mind, or the spirit. But I am no 
less interested in pointing out that beauty is everywhere 
and, possibly above all, that intelligence is everywhere. 
It is not my intention to elaborate a system of values, but 
the underlying thesis will be this: that morality and in- 
telligence and beauty are only so many artificial and con- 
ventional separations, justified doubtless by convenience 
of communication, of what is inseparable in the concrete 
reality of mind, or spirit, or life. For ethics this means 
that the whole meaning of morality is nothing less than 
life, and that its subject-matter is as broad as “human 
nature’; and in the last chapters I shall go on to point 
out that human nature is still the issue involved in ques- 
tions of knowledge and truth. 


§ 26 


So much for the place of morality among the values; now 
for the special character of utility. Morality, I have said, 
is everywhere. So far as the useful is the embodiment of 
human value, utility is also everywhere. Economic value, 
regarded as the expression of human need, is moral value.* 
And it is doubtless possible so to extend the application of 
“utility”, by appealing vaguely to “the larger utilities’, as 
to make it cover all of human life. But this is to give to the 
term a meaning and direction which is the reverse of the 


4T have dealt at length with the relation of the moral and the economic 
in a paper on “Moral Valuations and Economic Laws” in The Journal of 
Philosophy, Vol. XVI (1917), No. 1. 


100 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


“strictly utilitarian”. And it is my purpose throughout this 
essay to suggest that, in this stricter and only distinctive 
sense, utility is on the contrary a motive at variance with 
the motive of morality and in like fashion at variance with 
the motive of beauty and of truth. 

Morality, intelligence, beauty are expressions of life: 
utility represents the organization of life into a system of 
means and ends, the substitution of mechanism for choice 
and interest and of habit for critical intelligence. A world 
finally utilitarian would be a world from which choice and 
direction (hence, all morality) had vanished, a world to be 
referred in every detail to the operation of “economic law” 
—a situation far from being represented in any actual 
human world. 

To describe an activity as utilitarian is to say that it is 
a means to an end; and this implies that it is done not for 
its own sake but for the sake of its results. The interest 
and value lie wholly in the end. The end is a subject for 
intelligence and choice. The intelligence to be applied to 
the means is strictly limited; and in a thoroughly organized 
system of means and ends, as illustrated in an up-to-date 
factory system, the function of intelligence will be reduced 
to a minimum. So far as a man’s activity is merely 
utilitarian it means that he has ceased to be a moral agent 
and has assumed the status of a machine. 

Kant said, So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine 
own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end 
withal and never as a means only. ‘This marks the moral 
as distinct from the utilitarian order of society. In the 
conception of an “ordered society”, of higher and lower 
classes, the lower classes have relatively the status of means 


THE ON LEV OF Pa EGSPIRIT 101 


—to ends not their own. But the same implication resides 
in that more democratic conception of society which makes 
virtue for the individual to consist in being ‘“‘a useful mem- 
ber” devoted to the common good. It may happen that in 
his social function, however humble, the individual finds 
food for his imagination and an enjoyment of life. But 
this consideration is irrelevant, and even confusing, to the 
idea of “a useful member”. The ideally useful member is 
literally the machine; which alone exhibits a single-minded 
devotion to what it is designed to do. 

The conception of utility is illustrated “in thine own per- 
son” so far as one part of life is treated as a means for 
another part as end. This is what we mean when we refer 
to the utilitarian motive most of the activities involved in 
making a living. What is implied is that no one makes 
shoes from any interest in shoes, but only for the money 
to be received for them. And perhaps the best picture of 
the utilitarian life is that of the business man who, as con- 
ventionally conceived, spends weary years in business in 
the hope of retiring on a fortune, or of the wage-earner who 
patiently accumulates savings in the hope of living to en- 
joy them. Such are the typically “useful” lives, and the 
question I raise is whether they are the ideally moral lives. 
And the question may be extended to cover all of those 
conceptions in which life is viewed under the form of a 
“vocation” or a ‘‘career” subject to the issue of “failure” 
or ‘‘success’—even though success be defined in no sordid 
terms. Life may be good or bad, but I wonder in what 
sense, except as a means to alien ends, it may be said to 
involve the issue of success. 

This is not of course a proposal to banish utility from 


102 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


life. The utilitarian organization of life into a system of 
means and ends is a necessity of getting things done; and 
there can be no doubt that things must be done. But this 
is not to say that the system of ends and means is an ideal 
conception of life. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE 


§ 27. The forward-looking attitude. § 28. Anticipation vs. 
retrospection. § 29. Imagination and the specious present. § 30. 
Reflective intelligence and the flux of life. 


S a significant and interesting expression of the 
A utilitarian motive (or at least as a means of further 

defining that motive) I shall consider now the 
pragmatic attitude as represented by Professor John Dewey, 
an attitude also defined as “experimental” or ‘“‘empirical’”’. 
The attitude is significant as expressing the spirit of the 
age embodied in the conception of ‘‘modern progress’. 
And it is interesting as a basis of criticism because Pro- 
fessor Dewey is a thorough-going critic of orthodox moral- 
ity, who conceives morality to be coextensive with the 
meaning of “‘life’’, and conceives life as a process of re- 
flective intelligence. 

What remains, then, to give a utilitarian cast to the prag- 
matic attitude? I will put it as follows. For Professor 
Dewey it seems that the essence of immorality les in the 
adoption of ‘‘fixed ends’’; in taking any part of life to be 
of absolute and supreme importance, to which the rest of 
life is subordinate; or, as I should put it, in conceiving life 
as a matter of means and ends. He who adopts the 
orthodox program of fixed principles and unchanging moral 
laws has forsworn moral choice and made of himself a 
mechanism for the illustration of ‘moral law’. But he 


will be no less of a mechanism, no less of a non-moral 
103 


104 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


being, if he has committed himself absolutely to the at- 
tainment of any specific end. The moral attitude will be 
at every moment an attitude of open-mindedness. “We are 
in a non-moral condition whenever we want anything in- 
tensely’’, 7. e., absolutely, so as to limit the possibilities of 
choice. 

So far I follow him; and I should take this to mean that 
a man’s life is imperfectly moral so far as he sacrifices any 
part of himself, past or present. But now it seems, as I 
understand Professor Dewey (and I will not claim to under- 
stand him finally), that for him morality does consist pre- 
cisely in the constant sacrifice of the past—to the future or 
to the present. This is the essence of the pragmatic at- 
titude. And what it means is that the morality of open- 
mindedness is committed to a progressive as against a con- 
servative attitude. For Professor Dewey it seems that 
progressive and conservative are the equivalents of moral 
and immoral. In this progressive attitude I seem to see 
life defined and limited by the utilitarian—more concretely, 
by the modern business man’s point of view. 


§ 27 


According to Professor Dewey, “anticipation is more 
primary than recollection; projection than summoning of 
the past; the prospective than the retrospective.” ‘This pas- 
sage, from the essay in ‘‘Creative Intelligence” * states the 
essence, the quintessence, of the pragmatic attitude. The 
» pragmatic attitude is the forward-looking as against the 
backward-looking attitude. What it means is, Waste no 
time over unfulfilled hopes. Let the dead bury the dead, 


1 Creative Intelligence. Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. (By Dewey and 
others), 1917. I am repeating here some of the things said in my review of 
this book in The Nation (New York) for July 26, 1917. 


THY hIPRACMATLOIALTTLLCUDE 105 


and don’t cry over spilled milk. What you wanted in the 
past is of no consequence now. ‘The past is dead and gone, 
hence non-existent and unreal; the real lies all ahead—in 
the future, Professor Dewey seemed to me formerly to say, 
in the present as he seems more definitely to say now; in 
any case in a present which for its aims looks forward only. 

This forward-looking attitude is also for Professor 
Dewey the reflective attitude. One who looks forward in- 
telligently must of course also look back; and thus it hap- 
pens that in point of fact ‘reflection’ constitutes the central 
topic of most of Professor Dewey’s writings. By him, how- 
ever, the function of reflection appears to be strictly limited. 


“Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to suc- ‘ 


cessful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an 
instrument.” * This states the “instrumental” theory of 
reflection, of intelligence or of thought. According to this 
view, thought is a means for action as an end. The in- 
strumental view is thus the opposite of any view (such as 
what I call the critical view) which looks for the realization 
of life in reflection itself and finds in unthinking action 
rather the vehicle, or means. The instrumental theory of 
intelligence is likewise a biological theory. It means, if I 
may state it crudely, that God has endowed us with re- 
flective intelligence for the purpose of preserving our lives 
and of getting on in the world. For this practical purpose 
it is obviously necessary that we look back and recall which 
of the methods used in the past have been successful in at- 
taining their ends. To do this is the function of thought 
just as reproduction is the function of sex; and therefore 
any preoccupation of thought in other directions—indul- 
gence in retrospective enjoyment, sympathetic contempla- 


tion of dead hopes, revival of forgotten ambitions, any care 
2 Creative Intelligence, p. 14. 


vt 


106 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


whatever for what one formerly wanted, above all any 
present dissatisfaction because of past disappointments— 
all of this is an abnormality of the same order as the sexual 
abnormalities. From the instrumental point of view the past 
is only a means for the present, hence only something to be 
“used”, so far as it may be useful, on behalf of the present. 

Such is pragmatic “reflection”; a strange etymological 
fate, it may seem, for a word made out of re and flectere! 
To the ordinary man it will appear that reflection is bet- 
ter typified by those moments in which he, a “‘tired business 
man” returning from his office, or a tired professor 
returning from a lecture, sinks into an easy chair, with his 
feet upon another, and having lighted a pipe, forgets about 
getting on in life and takes up again the threads of past 
desires, interrupted by business, and speculates longingly 
upon the possibility of satisfying them; or decides perhaps 
to write to an old friend of years back, not because they 
have business to transact, or any plans to make, but be- 
cause the memories are too precious to be lost. out of life. 
Professor Dewey has his names for this species of reflective 
attitude. Formerly it stood for the “genteel tradition” of 
a leisure class*; later it was “‘senile’ *; but now, in his 
reference to “impotent wishes, compensatory dreams in con- 
sciousness” °, I see him prepared with the Freudians to call 
it “infantile’—which means that a respect for the past is a 
form of sexual aberration. 


§ 28 
Anticipation, then, is prior to recollection—if this be 
more than the dogmatic assertion of a private prejudice, 
3 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 72. 


4 Somewhere in Creative Intelligence. 
5 Human Nature and Conduct, p. 236. 


THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE 107 


what is its ground? For the life of me I can see but one 
_ ground, namely, the ground of practical efficiency, motived 
by the desire of getting things done, however done, and 
the necessity of getting them done now if they are to be 
done at all, since time and tide wait for no man. That 
this motive has its compelling logic will be clear enough. 
Upon it the business man has constructed a science. 
Knowing full well that the sole value of his present stock 
is what it will bring in the future he makes it a point when 
the season begins to decline to cut his prices ruthlessly with 
no retrospective regard to cost. Such a policy stands doubt- 
less for reflective intelligence, yet for a process in which 
reflection is reduced to a minimum by the prior adoption 
of cash-value as a fixed end, the only end that matters. 
And it is the exclusiveness of this end that makes the pro- 
spective attitude so exclusively logical. 

Applied to matters more personal, the simply prospective 
attitude seems even less consistent with an attitude of re- 
flection. When David shook off the sackcloth and ashes 
and became so quickly normal after hearing that the child 
of Bath-Sheba was dead, his friends naturally wondered. 
It was a trifle too practical and business-like. His expla- 
nation, that sackcloth and ashes are useless after the child 
is dead, is a really beautiful anticipation of the pragmatic 
attitude, but not suggestive of much depth of reflection. 
For the matter of that, however, the only practical attitude 
towards death is simply not to reflect upon it. You can 
make nothing of it. The thought of death paralyses ac- 
tion. And thus, as Freud has pointed out, death as a sub- 
ject of conversation is universally taboo. Here at any rate 
the reflective attitude is, not satisfied, but cut rudely short, 
by the practical attitude. To urge that grief is a luxury is 


108 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


to say, not Reflect! but rather Forget! For time is moving 
and hunger is pressing. Hence, on returning from the 
funeral the band plays “When Johnny Comes Marching 
Home Again”; not, however, on behalf of a reflective at- 
titude towards life. 

Just after I had read ‘“‘Creative Intelligence’’—in 1917, 
when it seemed that college teachers would be without an 
occupation for the coming year—a colleague spoke to me 
of his intention of spending the next year writing a book 
for which he had long been gathering material, for the 
writing of which, however, under the then disturbed con- 
ditions, he had little appetite. “Then”, I asked rather flip- 
pantly, yet interested to get his reply, ‘‘why bother about 
it?” “If I fail to write that book,” he said, “I shall have 
wasted twenty years of work.” Suppose now that he writes 
the book? Shall we say with Dewey that the writing of 
the book is an end for which the twenty years of work will 
be (now) merely instrumental? May we not as well say 
that the writing of the book will be merely instrumental in 
making good twenty years of work? For my own part I 
cannot see that either point of view is more real or es- 
sentially more intelligent than the other. Any rejection of 
one on behalf of the other will be a matter of temperament. 
Some men—not usually accounted the least reflective of 
men—are disposed to emphasize loyalty to the past; for 
them nothing is life which fails to realize their earlier aspi- 
rations. Others are disposed to emphasize the possibilities 
of the future, and for them nothing is life except as it Is 
pervaded by novelty and growth. 

And since the latter is the temperament expressed in the 
pragmatic attitude, it will serve to point the issue if I con- 
fess to a considerable sympathy—temperamental rather 


MHP PRAGMA TI Ce AT ULEUDE 109 


than intellectual perhaps—with the former. To sit at a 
man’s table and remember that the hospitality is the con- 
tinued fulfilment of a friendship of many years gives me 
a peculiarly hearty satisfaction. I was delighted to dis- 
cover some years ago after finishing a long task of writ- 
ing that both the title and the motive were those of a crude 
undergraduate essay which I had written long before and 
forgotten. To many persons this might suggest only a per- 
sistent obsession; for me, I must confess, it was a confirma- 
tion of truth. Most of my life I have cherished an infan- 
tile ambition to build with my own hands in some pleasant 
place a small summer camp which I should all the more 
enjoy because I had built it myself. The time for that has 
probably passed. Yet while Freudians and pragmatists 
smile, I continue to meditate upon my plans. Suppose that 
it is done: why should I then apologize for an infantile ob- 
session? Why might I not rather point to the result as a 
rounded achievement of reflective intelligence? 

And then I wonder whether pragmatists themselves may 
not be the victims of ‘‘impotent wishes” and “compensatory 
dreams”. The meliorists (among whom Professor Dewey 
enrolls himself), or the wide-awake men, would have us ; 
look upon the present era of history as a final emergence | 
from a day-dream; a dream of heaven as our compensation 
for the ills of earth. Modern enlightenment tells us that 
heaven is to be found, if anywhere, only upon earth itself, 
in social progress and reconstruction. This search for 
heaven upon earth is meliorism. But why should we ex- 
pect to find it—or to find any approach to it? ‘Ah! 
Vanitas Vanitatum!” writes Thackeray at the end of “‘Van- 
ity Fair”, ‘which of us is happy in this world? Which 
of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” Do 


110 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


meliorists suppose that bath-tubs and trolley-cars have in- 
tensified the joie de vivre? The whole trend of the “func- 
tional’, or the meliorist’s, psychology is to show that things 
have a positive value only in the getting and only a de- 
fensive value when possession is assured. We cannot then 
indeed do without them; nor could we be easy at any time 
without them when once the idea has been suggested. 
Progress is indeed a necessity in the sense that it is an in- 
escapable urge. But in what sense life is then made better 
meliorists do not pretend to make clear. Why, then, the 
eagerness of anticipation? May we not suspect that 
meliorism is but another compensatory dream—only now 
of a better time on earth to make up for the lost joys of 
heaven ? 

From the pragmatic point of view the typically unintel- 
ligent person is he whose views of life and plans of action, 
formed once for all, are never to be illumined either by 
reflection or by experience. ‘That such persons are unin- 
telligent may be readily admitted; and I will also admit, 
as an abstract proposition, that when pictures of the future 
produce a tendency to yawn it must be the mark of a de- 
fective imagination. Yet there is an opposite type of unin- 
telligence of which pragmatists commonly take no account: 
namely, the superficial seeker after novelty whose imagina- 
tion is so effervescently creative that he never holds a plan 
before him with sufficient steadiness to make it a subject 
for any reflection whatever. Which of these is the true 
type of intelligence and of the moral life, the stolid con- 
servative or the brainless radical? The question may be 
condemned as itself unintelligent. It may suffice, how- 
ever, to suggest that the moral life is as little to be defined 
by a preference for the future as by a preference for the 


THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE 111 


past. Morality is not a simple question of conservative 
versus progressive. 


§ 29 


It may then help us to state the question if we remember 
that in the last analysis the pragmatic attitude is arguing 
for the enjoyment of the present. And so indeed am I. 
That which is not present enjoyment I take to be so much 
out of life. But “the present’’—is this a conscious present 
or an unconscious present? The unconscious present is 
an abstract point of time which enjoys nothing. The 
conscious present—which James calls ‘“‘the specious pres- 
ent”—is never a point of time. What the “content” of 
this present may be, depends upon the range of imagina- 
tion. We may, as Royce has observed, speak with equal 
propriety of the present occasion or of the present century; 
or possibly of the eternal present of God, or the Absolute. 
Or with James of the present of “the tramp who lives 
from hour to hour; the Bohemian whose engagements are 
from day to day; the bachelor who builds but for a single 
life; the father who acts for another generation; the patriot 
who thinks of a whole community and many generations; 
and finally the philosopher and the saint whose cares are 
for humanity and eternity.” 

Now it will serve to characterize any attitude, as prag- 
matic or the reverse, if we can estimate the range of 
imagination implied in its present. And I will admit that 
I never quite know how much of reflective interpretation 
Professor Dewey may have tucked away in his “present”. 
If we accept his announcement we must believe that “the 
antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love’, 
including anything you please from the Monroe Doctrine 


)s 


\ 


Ei MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


to Botticelli.° And for aught I know his background in 
every present may be that of ein gottbetrunkener Mensch. 
But it will serve to define the pragmatic attitude (which is 
all that really matters) if I say that in reading the essays 
I get a very different impression; and that I seem to see 
him at every step clipping down the present until it rep- 
resents the range of imagination of only the ordinary 
unreflective man; at the same time characterizing what he 
has clipped away as “impotent wishes” or “romantic 
embellishments” of life. Thus he rejects the idea that 
actual life must be ‘‘a compromise with the best”’.‘ This 
idea implies an important conflict between facts and ideals, 
or between fact and imagination; and “there is no whole- 
sale discrepancy between existence and meaning; there is 
simply a ‘loosening’ of the two when objects do not fulfil 
our plans and meet our desires.” * In other words, there 
is nothing to justify what is called the problem of life, 
the meaning of life, or the tragedy of life. Problems, he 
tells us repeatedly, are always “specific”? problems con- 
cerned with “specific” questions; and anything like a 
philosophy of life should be left for the amusement of the 
poets.° Or, in other words, the end of action must lie in 
the action itself, and not outside.” 

What, it may be asked, are the boundaries of “the 
action’’, of ‘‘the present”, or (say) of life, so defined that 
you may point to something as lying outside? If you are 
thinking of a movement of the body, of the present point 
in time, or of the span of three score years and ten, the 


8 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 75. 

7 Human Nature and Conduct, p. 233. 

8 “The Intellectualist Criterion for Truth’ in The Influence of Darwin on 
Philosophy, 1910, p. 135. 

® “Intelligence and Morals” in the same volume, p. 71. 

10 Human Nature and Conduct, p. 223. 


MT weP RA GIOAT IO MAC TIT UD E ES 


meaning is clear enough; and you can then point definitely 
to what lies ‘outside’. But Professor Dewey does not 
mean this. Into “the action” or “the present” he will 
import some measure, however slight, of reflective intelli- 
gence, 7.¢., of imagination. But when this is done the 
outer boundaries of “the present”, of “the action”, or of 
life, become wholly problematic. It is even a question 
what you mean. All depends upon the range of imagina- 
tion; and this may include God, freedom, and immortality, 
heaven and hell as well as the life on earth. In brief, 
there is now nothing but an arbitrary limitation of imagi- 
nation by personal taste or by social convention—such as 
the convention established by the man on the street— 
which will mark off a pragmatic attitude from an attitude 
indefinitely ‘“romantic’’. 

In Professor Dewey’s conception of the pragmatic atti- 
tude such a limitation appears to be assumed. Why is 
there no “wholesale discrepancy” between fact and ideal, 
hence no question regarding the meaning of “life’? Just 
because there is in no “‘present’’, in no “‘action’’, a ‘‘whole- 
sale’ point of view. Human life is made to consist of a 
succession of temporary practical problems, each of them 
set and once for all given by the outcome of the last and 
each of them to be solved, or in some form to be disposed 
of, right away. Arrived in Philadelphia, where do I go 
next? But where, I might also ask, am I to go after that? 
Even this question can hardly be considered, it will not 
be a real and present question, until I have arrived at the 
next place. Hence the moral question is always to be 
limited to the question of, What next? And not only to 
the question of, What next? (which may conceivably 
imply any range of imagination whatever), but to what 


114 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


bears upon that question directly and immediately. 
In other words, the imagination implied in the present 
tends to be confined within the limits, if not of the imagi- 
nation of “the tramp who lives from hour to hour” or of 
“the Bohemian whose engagements are from day to day”, 
yet of the business man who must give all of his attention 
to the task before him. Only as we conceive imagination 
to be thus restricted can we define a distinctively prag- 
matic attitude. 

And in this connection it strikes me as a very interesting 
mark of the pragmatic attitude that (as I seem to note) 
when Professor Dewey will present you with an illustration 
of reflective intelligence he almost invariably introduces a 
business man, a manufacturer, or an inventor. Having 
got this impression before,‘ I was not surprised to find 
his chapter on “The Nature of Aims” in “Human Nature 
and Conduct”? concerned mainly with bows and arrows 
and electric lights, and reflective intelligence represented by 
Edison. Metaphors and illustrations are often more 
illuminating than arguments. And it may serve again 
to mark the pragmatic attitude if I say that it would never 
occur to me to select Edison as a type of reflective in- 
telligence as long as I could recall the names of 
Shakespeare or Goethe, Thackeray or Tourgenieff, Newton 
or Darwin, Washington or Lincoln, or our own William 
James. It is quite possible that I fail to appreciate the 
depth of reflection represented by the electric light; yet 
while the inventor of the pragmatic logic is bowing 
deferentially to the inventor of the electric light I find 
myself wondering whether the pragmatic logic, which has 
been for me a never-ending source of fruitful questions, 


11 See, for example, pp. 24 and 35 of the important “Introduction” to Essays 
in Experimental Logic. 


Tory EeEP RIA GAA TLC. ACT PIT UDE 1 


should not, in terms of reflective intelligence, stand for 
more than all of the electric apparatus invented to date. 
As a final suggestion of the meaning of the pragmatic 
attitude I will point to the contrast between the pragmatic 
attitude and the humanistic. The only term of the kind 
that I have cared to apply to what I call the “critical” 
view is the rather vague term “humanism”. And “hu- 
manism” is the term applied by Dr. Schiller of Oxford to 
his own version of the pragmatic attitude. Professor 
Dewey seems to prefer almost any other, and I think he 
is right in feeling that between his pragmatic attitude and 
what is generally regarded as “humanistic” the difference 
is fundamental. As an expression of the humanistic atti- 
tude I can think of nothing finer than a passage from the 
close of Walter Pater’s essay on “Pico della Mirandola”: 


“He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, 
and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than 
because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in knowl- 
edge, which would come down and unite what men’s ignorance had 


Oe 


divided, and renew what time had made dim. . . . For the essence ™ 


» of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, 
that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can _ ¢ 


wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, nor oracle 


beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once © 


been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they | 


have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.” 


“Nothing which has ever interested living men and = 


women can wholly lose its vitality.” One can hardly state 
the limits of what this may be taken to mean. Such, how- 
ever, is the attitude of humanism; and at the lowest terms 
it offers a complete contrast to the attitude of pragmatism. 
For whatever else the pragmatic attitude may mean, it 
means this—and such is Professor Dewey’s constant 


116 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


iteration: that nothing which has ever interested living men 
and women can have more than a passing vitality.” 


§ 30 


So much for the pragmatic attitude. The pragmatic 
» attitude, speaking in the name of reflective intelligence, 
makes the past life an instrument for the present. As 
_ against this I am urging that an intelligence genuinely 
_ reflective will refuse to treat any part of life as a mere 
means to another. Reflection I will identify with “imag- 
ination”; and a reflective living of life means that we 
live each moment in the light of the largest possible range 
of imagination. 

But what this would mean in terms of a temporal progres- 
sion, or of a pattern of life, is a question hardly to be 
answered. Rather it is to be answered in countless ways, 
but by poets (speaking in the larger sense) rather than by 
scientifically prosaic philosophers. It seems that life as 
thus conceived must be ever continuous yet ever creative; 
ever a present enjoyment which embraces both a fulfilment 
of the past and a fulfilment of the future. But how? 
For imagination works variously. It has, for example, 
a strangely transforming effect upon the common relation 
of means and ends. To go through a hard and dreary 
grind for an end to be enjoyed only, if at all, in the dis- 
tant future, is not morality but brutality. Yet so far as 
the vision of the future is clear some of its enjoyment is 
realized in the present. ‘Thus we find grown persons more 
content to wait, happier in the waiting, than children; 
at least trained to patient resignation. But patient res- 
ignation is by no means a moral ideal. If this is the best 


12 See the very interesting essay on “The Significance of the Problem of 
Knowledge”, reprinted in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, 1910. 


Peep RAGMATIC A’ LEITUDE 117 


one can do with the present way of life, it is better to try 
another. Yet it may also be that imagination directed 
upon the present means may make them interesting for 
themselves. Because a man enjoys eating bacon for break- 
fast he may be willing to cook it—thus far the eating is 
profit, the cooking is loss. But presently he may dis- 
cover that to cook bacon properly is a nice problem from 
the standpoint both of reflective intelligence and of artis- 
tic skill; and then he may find himself eating bacon mainly 
for the pleasure of cooking it. I make the illustration 
purposely crude to suggest that the distinction of end and 
means is a function of imagination and that indefinite 
possibilities of present realization may lie in the reflective 
treatment of the means. The business man whose pro- 
fessed purpose is to make money may be really interested 
in “business”. Thus far his attitude has ceased to be 
merely utilitarian. 

In a fashion likewise uncertain and difficult to describe, 
imagination deals with the past. It does of course make the 
past available for present uses, as instrumentalism claims. 
But it also makes the past real and present—just as real 
and just as present, when you are not disturbed by the 
need of getting on, as the present moment itself. And ° 
thus imagination works to destroy that past-and-gone : 
feature of the temporal past which most of all marks the’ 
so-called reality of time: nothing would be irrevocable if 
your imagination were all-sufficient. Again, however, it 
makes the past desires living. Yet at the same time it 
may show us that in ways not contemplated at their in- 
ception they have been satisfied and fulfilled. 

If I should offer an imaginative picture beginning with, 
“Life is like—,” the reader would be reminded of the 


118 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


host of parables and metaphors in which men have 
sought, each according to the quality of his imagination, 
to concentrate into one picture the whole meaning of life. 
How shall we picture the life of reflective intelligence— 
reflective and also (as pragmatism teaches) creative? 
Resorting thus to metaphor I might say that for me the 
life of reflective intelligence is not a business enterprise, in 
which each past term is only a means to a prospective end; 
nor, again, a logical exposition, in which the premises are 
interesting only as leading to a conclusion; but more of 
the nature of a work of art, such as a symphony, in which 
‘there is temporal progression, yet no distinction among 
‘movements of means and ends, each present passage hav- 
ing its own serene worth, quite as retrospective as 
prospective, and there is no thought of getting anything 
over with and done. But to make this an experience of 
living you must put yourself within the movement of the 
progression. And then, as I conceive, each new present 
will be indeed, as pragmatists teach, a newly created unity, 
a new plan of life, the fruit of ripened experience; yet a 
unity which will gather together the unfulfilled aspirations 
of the past quite as much as it looks towards the future. 


CHAPTER IX 
THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 


§ 31. Intelligence and the serpent. § 32. The moral fault and 
the intellectual. § 33. The clever rogue and the simple honest man. 
§ 34. The critical life and the question of intelligence. § 35. In- 
telligence ys. intellect, mathematical and logical. § 36. Intelligence 
personal and critical. 


§ 31 


oc OW the serpent was more subtle than any beast 


of the field which the Lord God had made.” 

This announcement marks the opening of that 
brief but portentous drama, representing the conflict be- 
tween authority and intelligence, which comprises the 
third chapter of Genesis. And the selection of the serpent 
to play the part of intelligence expresses an ancient and 
deeply-rooted human prejudice; a prejudice further illus- 
trated by the choice of Mephistopheles or Iago for the 
villain of the play. Authoritarian moralists, it goes with- 
out saying, are committed to a discouragement of intelli- 
gence; since it can never be predicted that an exercise of 
intelligence will confirm authority. And probably many a 
parent with a son at college is consoled when the lad 
learns little by the thought that he might learn too much. 
Related to these is that considerable class of slow-minded 
but sentimentally “sensitive” persons whose intercourse 
with others, ever uneasy, seems to be dominated by the 


fear of exposing their private thinking to the test of criti- 
119 


120 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


_ cism. They have indeed the practical justification that 
the test may serve only to worst them in an argument with- 
out proving anything; and one need not be a sentimen- 
talist to realize that a finally satisfying conviction, if there 
is to be one, will not be a matter of argument. 

Yet aside from all this, it seems to be a part of the 
natural man to be irritated by the presence of critical and 
imaginative persons who, though they refrain from com- 
ment and inquiry, may not be trusted to take what we tell 
them at its face value, but may rather be counted upon 
to form their own opinions and to entertain further ques- 
tions. As a protection against such persons we erect an 
inner sanctum in which our motives may be stored safe 
from outer criticism—and also from our own. And in 
this attitude we have the support of all ‘“‘sane and prac- 
tical” men, whose point of view is well expressed by 
Shakespeare’s Caesar when he says: 


Let me have men about me that are fat, 
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights, 
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, 

He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. 


Remembering Caesar’s ambitions we may sympathize 
with his desire to have men about him who sleep at night 
while he remains awake. But this may lead us to look 
more tolerantly upon the lean and hungry Cassius. And 
we may then acquire a certain respect for the serpent if, 
divesting ourselves of the tradition in which most of us 
have been bred, we read the story as an episode in mythol- 
ogy. As such it will take its place beside the many 
heathen myths in which the all-powerful gods are unac- 
countably baffled by the activities of their own creatures. 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 121 


And read in this light it will appear, I think, that of the 
four characters in the play, the Lord God, the man, the 
woman, and the serpent, the serpent is the clearest rep- 
resentative of critical intelligence; for he is able seemingly 
to perplex the Lord God himself. 

Nor is his intelligence a mere vulgar cunning. For, 
strangely, his most insidious suggestion embodies what 
may be regarded as the deepest truth of moral philoso- 
phy: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, 
then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, 
knowing good and evil.” It will be interesting to com- 
pare this with the words of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel: 
“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free.” 

The moral aspect of the situation seems likewise altered 
when we transfer the conflict of motives to a more modern 
setting. Reading the story in the spirit of the ancient 
conceptions of property, regarding the man and the woman 
as the Lord God’s creatures—and remembering perhaps 
that knowledge hardly adds to contentment—the serpent 
appears to be only a mischievous intruder upon the peace 
and harmony of the garden. But if we substitute for 
the Lord God a Russian landed-proprietor before the 
Emancipation, or a southern planter before the Civil War, 
or a capitalistic employer of today claiming by virtue of 
his position the right of master; and for the serpent one 
of those who would awaken the subjects to a consciousness 
of their power and a sense of their manhood; it may then 
be difficult to see how the part of the serpent differs from 
the part played by those whom today we honor as deliverers 
from ignorance and superstition, or how a communication of 
the wisdom of the serpent is other than a communication 


122 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


of moral responsibility. And it will strengthen the sugges- 
tion if we remember that in conservative eyes the critic of 
social institutions wears invariably the aspect of a serpent, 
whose wisdom is merely specious and “‘subtle’’. 


Sia2 


The opposition of morality and intelligence belongs to 
that departmental conception of the soul to which I have 
referred above, and according to which all of the knowing, 
or the intelligence, is done in one room of the soul, all of 
the willing, or the morality, in another, while a third is 
occupied exclusively by feeling, or taste. On this theory 
it becomes possible for the abstract “moral self” to charge 
some of his errors to the account of the abstract “knowing 
self’, who may then be treated as morally suspicious and 
“dangerous”. 

When, however, we examine concrete cases of error, on 
the part of ourselves or of others, it seems that we are 
hardly able to effect a complete separation between the 
moral fault and the intellectual. Jones has wrecked his 
automobile in an “unavoidable” accident. Knowing that 
some persons are more lable than others to unavoidable 
accidents our first inquiry may be directed upon the per- 
sonality of Jones. From our human standpoint there are 
doubtless accidents truly unavoidable, due to contingencies 
which, as we say, only a divine wisdom could have antici- 
pated. But even this is not to say that they could have 
been anticipated by no wisdom whatever. And the divid- 
ing line between human and divine wisdom, between what 
could be expected of Jones and what could be expected 
only of a higher order of being, remains always uncertain. 
Meanwhile we do know that one’s vision of danger, even 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 123 


if limited ultimately, may be broadened indefinitely by a 
more intensive sense of responsibility. And if Jones is a 
morally sensitive person, and the accident has resulted 
in death, especially the death of one near to him, it is 
doubtful whether, though he has used ordinary foresight, 
he will ever rest comfortably in the conviction that the 
contingencies bringing about the accident were beyond 
the limits of any possible foresight. In the light of later 
reflection he is likely to go through life tormented by the 
thought, “I might have known, and therefore I ought to 
have known.” 

In this he will be stating the most essential proposition 
of moral responsibility and free will. This doctrine rests, 
I should say, upon a fact; at least upon an experience: 
upon the experience, namely, that retrospectively it is 
never possible to see why—whatever range of imagination 
might be implied—you or I could not know what it was 
possible for some other intelligence to know. It is the old 
story of Columbus and the egg, illustrated in the solution 
of any problem you please. In the light of the solution 
you and I can never see why we had to miss it, and the 
fact that we did miss it is now more or less humiliating. 
Physical powers, it seems, have their well-defined limits, 
but mental powers appear to have essentially none. Hence 
that A can lift a heavier weight than I can lift, I am con- 
tent to accept as a fact; but to say that another intelligence 
has seen what I did not see is always in some degree to 
say that I also ought to have seen. 

Suppose, again, that Brown has been betrayed by an 
agent whom he has trusted. It is worth noting that errors 
of this kind are peculiarly humiliating. And if Brown 
were a morally sensitive person his reflections might easily 


124 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


take form as follows: What it all means is that I did 
not quite know an honest man from a rogue; and this in 
turn can mean only that I am not a sensitively honest 
man. And his reflections would be supported in the gross 
by the consideration that the victims of “get-rich-quick” 
schemers and of '‘gold-brick” men are not likely to be of 
the purest type of character—at least they are betrayed by 
an overreaching cupidity—while the “green-goods” man 
appeals frankly to a dishonest motive. 


Spek 


“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of 
wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as 
doves.”” Any separation of the moral from the intellectual 
seems bound to issue in a division of men into two classes: 
in one class the wolves and the serpents, in the other the 
sheep and the doves; in one class the “clever rogue’’, or 
the “astute diplomat”, shrewd but unscrupulous, in the 
other the “simple honest man’’, or “‘simple rustic’, naively 
scrupulous. The popular mind finds it difficult to be- 
lieve that a “brainy”? man can be altogether honest or that 
an honest man can fail to be somewhat deficient in 
“brains’’; and the more reflective mind may still be con- 
fronted with an ever curious question. ‘This clever rogue 
—is he so very clever? ‘This trustworthy honest man— 
is he trustworthy only because he is a fool? My own 
conviction is that any attempt thus to classify the men we 
meet only reveals the futility of the distinction, and I 
am inclined to put the clever rogue and the simple honest 
man into the class of convenient fictions. But in moral 
philosophy there are no authoritative opinions, and the 
point is to see what the question means. 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 125 


Take first the ‘“‘clever rogue’. From the superior stand- 
point of ‘the intelligent classes” we are likely to find him 
writ large in the patent-medicine man and the cheap 
politician. Yet if we note the temerity with which these 
persons reproduce pictures of themselves in the newspapers 
and on the advertising boards, displaying countenances in 
which it often seems that the word “rogue” is written in 
every line, we must surely doubt whether they are so very 
clever. Do they, let us ask ourselves, know what im- 
pression they are conveying to every more critical mind, 
and do they then deliberately defy that judgment for the 
sake of deceiving the stupid? JI think this is greatly to be 
doubted, and I suspect that even the shrewdest of them 
display their pictures because, like you or me, they con- 
ceive their countenances to be impressive. 

It is a fair supposition, I should say, that there is no- 
where any striking difference of level, either moral or in- 
tellectual, between a political or other representative and 
the average of his constituents—he is not the wolf among 
the sheep or the serpent among the doves. Some years 
ago Miss Jane Addams printed an impressive study,’ based 
upon intimate experience, of the typical corrupt alderman 
and his typical constituency of foreign-born citizens. As 
against the current view of political reformers that these 
voters were without moral ideals, it was shown that on the 
contrary they were guided by what was from their point of 
view a very reasonable conception of ‘‘a good man”: the 
man who stood by them in difficulty, who provided coal 
and warm clothing in winter, who found jobs for their 
sons and helped on occasion to adjust their difficulties with 
the police, and who, above all (a very large consideration 


1“Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption” in The International Journal 
of Ethics, VIII (April, 1898), No. 3. 


126 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


in the minds of the foreign poor), saw that no constituent 
lacked the dignity of a reputable funeral. That the funds 
for these benefits came from bribes for street-railway fran- 
chises, they knew well enough, but this they could excuse 
as only a mode of restitution. What shall we say, how- 
ever, of the alderman himself? I think we can have no 
ground for supposing that he did not take himself 
just as his constituents took him, as a good-hearted and 
generous man. In other words, he was no more intelli- 
gent than he was scrupulous. 

This is doubtless to put the question at only a vulgar 
level, and (it may be objected) in terms of an intelligence 
hardly to be compared with the refined astuteness of the 
Macchiavellian diplomat who really sets our problem. But 
it is my purpose to raise the question whether the situa- 
tion as just presented will not be true for any level. No 
one can of course pretend to have measured the heights of 
intelligence. All that any of us can do is to ask himself 
whether a closer acquaintance with those who within 
his personal environment are famed for Macchiavellian 
astuteness increases his respect for their intelligence. And 
in this matter it would prove nothing to offer personal ob- 
servations unless they could be made concrete. What 
shall we say, however, about Macchiavelli himself? De- 
fenders of Macchiavelli are accustomed to endow him with 
a marvellous insight into human nature—chiefly, it seems, 
because of his lack of moral scruple. Yet in the end they 
convict him of having underestimated the force of moral 
considerations—as if these considerations were somehow 
accidental to human nature. Now it would prove nothing 
to say that Macchiavelli’s personal career was a failure. 
Nor should we forget that ‘The Prince’ was a serious 


Ter ee Wel sD OM: O-Fir tore SERPENT (12/7 


political philosophy, presenting perhaps the earliest vision 
of the modern nation-state, conceived as a united Italy. 
Yet in reading Macchiavelli today (after four centuries, 
to be sure) it seems to me that what is chiefly remarkable 
is not so much his cool advocacy of treachery and assas- 
sination as a policy of state—which was probably only to 
stand for “realistic” statesmanship under the conditions of 
his day—as his simplicity in supposing that the end that 
he had in mind, the unification of Italy, could be estab- 
lished and indefinitely maintained by mere ingenuity of 
statecraft, and with so little regard for the needs and 
the aspirations, and the economic conditions, of the peoples 
to be unified. Such, it would seem, must be the reflection 
of any modern historian. But a crowning simplicity seems 
to lie in the idea of the essay itself. If the instructions 
to the prince were to be of any value whatever it must 
be in the form of a private document, yet the essay is a 
contribution to literature. 

This is to state the point of the whole question. What 
of the Macchiavellian diplomat who has acquired a 
Macchiavellian reputation? Let it be remembered that 
these are the only Macchiavellians we can be called upon 
to consider. The secret Macchiavellians are fated to re- 
main indistinguishable among the mass of moderately 
decent citizens. What shall we say of the intelligence of 
a man who, however competent otherwise, prides himself 
upon his finesse—that is, upon his ability to play a game 
with his neighbor—and who thereby establishes a reputa- 
tion for finesse? At this point it seems that his grasp of 
human nature is defective; he has failed to see the conse- 
quences of establishing a reputation. It seems not too 
much to say that any man who prides himself upon his 


128 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


knowledge of human nature thereby proclaims himself a 
fool: all that he proves is a naive conception of human 
nature. 

And on the other hand what if a man does understand 
human nature? Can his understanding be then dis- 
sociated from moral scruple? We do not find men 
whose business it is to inflict pain—surgeons and judges, 
for example—expecting to fortify themselves by under- 
standing the pain they inflict. And if it should happen 
that further acquaintance with one of the reputedly “shrewd 
but unscrupulous” only increases my respect for his intelli- 
gence, it seems to me that one consequence is inevitable: 
I must then deeply question my own previously formed 
moral ideals. For if his insight is generally so superior 
to mine, how can he be altogether mistaken about what 
is really good? 

Turning now to the “simple honest man’, I shall as- 
sume that the “simple”, or stupid, man is not to be 
confused with the merely uneducated. To find uneducated 
men who are sensitively honest does not mean that you 
have found this honesty in the stupid. The question that 
I raise here relates to the convention of ‘simple honesty” 
—the conjunction of these two terms—and I wonder how 
any person who has faced the problem of honesty can 
suppose that honesty is “‘simple’’, and therefore a virtue 
peculiarly appropriate to the unintelligent. In the busi- 
ness world honesty is simplified by convention. Holding 
a piece of real estate which I expect (perhaps as the re- 
sult of private information) to diminish in value, I decide 
to put it upon the market; and to escape inconvenient 
questions I put it into the hands of an agent. I let the 
buyer take care of himself; I tell him no lies; and thus 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 129 


I remain conventionally honest. But suppose I learn that 
a person of my acquaintance is about to buy the property 
as an investment, putting into it perhaps the whole of a 
rather small capital Ought I to warn him? The 
question of honesty is at least not so simple now as be- 
fore. Yet, in any of the relations between men, the ques- 
tions of honesty presented by matters of business are among 
the relatively simple. What shall we say when honesty 
becomes a question of honor and loyalty, between friend 
and friend, between man and wife, or father and son? It 
seems that ‘“‘simple honesty” must now be the equivalent 
of a fine and discriminating intelligence. 

And therefore I will put the case of the simple honest 
man as follows: Do you find men who respond to you 
with a finely discriminating sense of what is fair and 
honorable, from whom, however, you can obtain no intelli- 
gent response, with whom you can hold no intelligent con- 
versation, upon any other subject? Or do you find men 
with a highly intelligent appreciation of other aspects of 
life who in any question of what is just and honorable are 
simply obtuse? I know that the existence of such persons 
—geniuses without conscience and dull-minded saints—is 
accepted as a common matter of fact. The question will 
be whether the conventional statement of fact will satisfy 
your personal experience; which will naturally include 
more dull-minded persons than geniuses. For my own 
part I do not seem to find among the dull-minded what 
we mean—what we all mean—by “an honest man”. 
What I rather expect to find is a low cunning. An honest 
man is no lifeless pattern of rectitude, but a communicable 
soul; towards whom you can safely expand, with whom 
you can be confidential, and whom you can trust precisely 


130 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


because you can communicate with him. And he who is 
thus communicable I can hardly rank among the dull. 

It is not to be denied that the clever rogue is very fre- 
quently successful. But to make success a test of intelli- 
gence would be to affirm what I am most concerned to 
deny, namely, the identity of intelligence with practical 
wisdom. Hence I will not only admit, I will even insist, 
that one may be easily too intelligent for success in busi- 
ness or in politics or in social life. The practical man’s 
objection to the Cassiuses who “think too much” is from 
his own point of view perfectly sound. To work easily 
with other men it is an advantage to be able to take them 
at their own estimate. To sell goods with the best success 
you must believe in the goods you are selling. A piano- 
salesman whom I met on the train, who after many years » 
-with one company had entered the service of its chief rival, 
told me with some humor that he had found it rather em- 
barrassing at first to “talk up” to his old customers the 
piano he had always condemned; and he had only overcome 
his embarrassment by dismissing the moral question. Had 
he ventured upon further researches into moral philosophy 
I fear his salesmanship would have been ruined. Would 
he then, however, have been less intelligent? 

But this is to suggest that the question of fact is at 
bottom also a question of the meaning of intelligence; 
which is the form of the question to which I am coming. 


§ 34 


Morality I have defined above as the self-conscious 
living of life; more bluntly as knowing what you are 
doing. And therefore for me morality is intelligence. 
As a believer in intelligence I believe in analysis without 


Phew Ss Dime O best bas BR PENT. 131 


end. I believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth, in 
letting your right hand know what your left hand is 
doing, and in letting no false respect for persons forbid 
an intimate analysis of motives, of your friend, your wife, 
your child, or your grandmother. But I believe that 
morality is above all an analysis of your own motives. 

As a believer in intelligence I repeat Aristotle’s state- 
ment that all men desire by nature to know; only adding, 
more explicitly, that in the desire to know we have the cen- 
tral and fundamental fact of human nature. To William 
James’s statement that knowing is always for the sake of 
doing I reply that the only valuable fruit of the doing is 
the knowing. What is the value of ‘“‘doing things” if we 
don’t know what we are doing? Or how is one to be 
credited with doing something if it be not a knowing- 
doing? To do in any significant sense is to do self- 
consciously. And therefore as a believer in intelligence I 
place the satisfactions of knowing—spiritual expansion 
and the enlargement of vision—against all the utilitarian 
advantages of knowing; which themselves must be meas- 
ured ultimately in terms of the knowing itself. ’Tis 
better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at 
all; and, if there be any better in the universe, better to 
have lived and lost. It is better to have played the hand 
and lost it (I am thinking of the game of bridge) if the 
hand presented any worthy problem. You have lost 
your money, or your points, as the case may be, but you 
have gained in insight. And for the believer in intelli- 
gence this is the real score of the game. 

To profess the belief that morality is intelligence is at 
once to suggest the Greek view of life. Among the Greeks, 
as I pointed out above, morality was conceived in terms 


132 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


of “the good” rather than of “the right”; and thus in 
terms of choice rather than of authority. And all of the 
Greek moral philosophy is marked by a belief, in some 
sense, in the doctrine of Socrates that virtue is knowledge. 
Yet the doctrine of knowledge, and the Greek view of life, 
presented a problem, even for the Greeks. Plato, for 
whom virtue is nothing if not knowledge, sees that knowl- 
edge may be mistaken for a calculating prudence and is at 
pains to distinguish true knowledge from the specious 
wisdom of the sophists. Aristotle suggests that virtue calls 
for something more than knowledge, yet he concedes that 
perhaps the whole question is a question of what is true 
knowledge, or intelligence. 

And thus, having stated the creed, we face the question 
—to which I have thus far been leading—what is to be 
understood by intelligence? For I fancy that no one who 
finds inspiration in the thought that morality is intelligence 
will say that for him life is a matter of accounting or of 
engineering. The question involves, then, the distinction 
between two competing conceptions of intelligence, which 
I may describe as, respectively, mechanical or mathematical 
intelligence and personal or critical intelligence; or again as 
scientific intelligence and humane intelligence. What this 
means I will venture to suggest through a very humble 
illustration. 

Several years ago one of my children returning from a 
summer holiday brought with him a black kitten about 
four months old to which I was appointed, partly by force 
of circumstances, and partly by the choice of the kitten, 
the guardian and next friend. The kitten discovered 
quickly not only that my study was a quiet and comfortable 
place but that I was for him an indulgent person. He 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 133 


learned also that the study, having one door opening into 
the hall and another leading to a side porch, was a con- 
venient passage in and out of the house; the more so since 
he could always rely upon me at his call to let him in at 
one door and out of the other. But what he never dis- 
covered, and what I could never teach him, was, in going 
out to stand back so that the opening door should not strike 
him in the face. To the end of my guardianship he never 
got out without having his nose thumped; at which he 
never ceased to be surprised and resentful. 

Was the kitten intelligent? Although unable to com- 
prehend doors, he seemed very well able (and in more ways 
than I have stated) to comprehend me. He was lacking 
in scientific intelligence, but he seemed to have humane 
intelligence. Was he, however, really intelligent? 

An animal psychologist would have set him down as 
hopelessly unintelligent. The animal psychologist is ac- 
customed by tradition to test the intelligence of an animal 
by putting him into a box with some sort of latch to it 
and then noting how long it takes the animal to master 
the latch—as if Bergson had never reminded us that man 
alone is interested in such things. Or he puts the animal 
into a maze and again notes how long it takes him to find 
his way out. But not only the animal psychologist. 
The same sort of test is today applied to human intelligence. 
The so-called intelligence-tests are full of puzzles and 
tricks which, if not, like locks, embodied in metal or 
wood, are built upon the same mechanical principle. And 
among the populace the mechanical criterion of intelligence 
is now well-nigh universal, the wisdom of the serpent 
(which strikes me as after all a more humane sort of 
wisdom) having been replaced by the wisdom of the 


134 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


machine. The proud parent points triumphantly to the 
signs of intelligence in his son, the signs being that the boy 
has quickly and thoroughly mastered the secrets of the au- 
tomobile or of the radio-set. Whether the lad will ever 
understand a line of poetry, or sit comfortably through a 
good concert, enjoy a good novel, look with interest upon 
a good picture, or grasp the meaning and motive of 
courtesy—these questions the parent omits to ask. 

And so, before rejecting (or accepting) the doctrine that 
morality is intelligence, it is needful that we consider the 
alternative conceptions of intelligence. 


§ 35 


The scientific and mechanical conception of intelligence 
identifies intelligence with ‘“‘intellect”. And those who 
adopt this conception are called—by their critics, however, 
oftener than by themselves—“‘intellectualists’”’.? For this 
view the type and ideal of intelligence is found in the 
“cold-blooded reasoning’ which is characteristic of 
arithmetical calculation, of geometrical demonstration, and 
of the syllogisms of formal logic. And such is the fasci- 
nation of numbers, forms, and syllogisms that some philoso- 
phers, among them Mr. Bertrand Russell,® following 
Pythagoras and Plato, find in them a revelation of the 
divine nature, while many mathematicians are now telling 
us that for the essence of logic we must go to mathematics. 
Mathematics, they mean, is not merely an illustration of 
logic; mathematics is logic, and the only logic. 


2In an article on “Intellectualism” in The Nation of some years ago, ex- 
pressing the same views as those given here, I took the name of “intellectual- 
ist” for myself. The only difference here is that I reject the name. ‘“In- 
telligencist” would convey my meaning; but the term is hardly permissible. 

3In The Problems of Philosophy, at least. From an article by Mr. Russell 
printed since the above was written I judge that the view is now repudiated. 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 135 


Now I would not for a moment question the utility 
either of mathematics or of formal logic. The apparatus 
of the syllogism supplies useful weapons for defence. 
To point out that your opponent is reasoning in a circle 
or has converted an A-proposition simply is usually to 
silence him—even though you suspect that a true A- 
proposition ought to be capable of simple conversion and 
that reasoning ought in circular fashion to make ends meet. 
And it is worth noting that for Aristotle, the inventor of 
formal logic, the question constantly uppermost is, If your 
opponent says this or that, how will you reply to him? 
Logic, it seems, is concerned with the game of debate; and 
“formal logic” is a statement of the rules of the game. 
One recalls the question credited to Jowett, Is logic a 
science or an art? and his answer, It is neither, it is a 
dodge. 

It is not, however, upon merely sporting grounds that I 
would concede the utility of logic. Nor merely concede. 
Rather is it an important part of my argument to insist 
that there is a solid basis for logic in a utility soberly 
practical and business-like. Formal logic, I should say, 
is the casuistry of thought just as formal ethics, or right- 
conduct ethics, is the casuistry of motive; and just as 
formal ethics substitutes utility for morality so in formal 
logic is utility substituted for intelligence, or thought. 
Now logicians themselves are not as a rule prepared to say 
that the forms of logic are a simple portraiture of thought. 
Logic, they are likely to tell us, is a method not of thought 
but of demonstration; not of discovery but of proof. 
Logic, again, is a method of settling disputes. In deal- 
ing with the plain man, whom I meet in the person of the 
undergraduate student, I am constantly confronted with 


136 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


such questions as, Well, how are you going to settle the 
question? Who is to be the judge? Or perhaps, Who is 
to be the umpire? In such questions the plain man 
supposes naively that he is expressing a demand for truth; 
and if you reply that you are not primarily eager to settle 
the question he will set you down as a lost soul. It is 
not perceived that to settle a question means only to dismiss 
the question and get it out of the way while the answer 
to the question lies perhaps indefinitely far beyond. Yet 
questions that cannot be answered must none the less be 
settled. 

I believe we may state the whole case by saying that 
logic—likewise all of scientific method, but in particular 
logic—is thought sacrificed, trimmed .and pared down, to 
certain vitally important needs of communication: to the 
very vital need, in short, of communicating something to 
another person in such a way that you can be absolutely 
certain that he has received your communication just as 
you intended it. One need not be reminded how vital is 
this certainty of communication to the conduct not only 
of business but of all practical life. In this age when 
practical activities are tending universally to become 
socially organized activities it is the necessity underlying 
all other necessities. Yet it is no less clear that the more 
absolute you make the terms of communication the less 
you can communicate, and the less you can convey of your 
personal meaning. The only absolute language, we are 
told truly enough, is the language of mathematical notation. 
Formal logic states, then, not merely the rules of a game 
but the conditions of a contract. It is the embodiment of 
a modus vivendi. A contract is supposed to express a 
meeting of minds; but every one knows how little of 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 137 


the meeting of minds can be embodied in the terms of a 
contract and how much must at best be left to personal 
understanding. Even a contract is not to be relied upon 
in dealing with a rogue. 

An essential mark of the cold-bloodedness of cold- 
blooded reasoning, be it noted, is the absolute lack of 
uncertainty, of hesitation, of any process of deliberation, 
with which, in a process ideally intellectual, the thought, 
or argument, passes from each point to the next. Given 
A; therefore B; therefore C; therefore D. He who in 
this derivation pauses to deliberate—thus implying, for 
example, that some other term, M, might conceivably be 
contemplated by the side of C as a possible consequence 
of B—is thus far defectively intellectual. And he who 
would venture to import into the logical process an element 
of personal choice or taste is a traitor to the intellectual 
ideal. By a strange paradox it seems that the ideally in- 
tellectual process is marked by a complete absence of that 
activity of weighing and judging—that activity of imagi- 
nation, we might say—which from any other point of view 
seems to be just the most characteristic mark of any proc- 
ess of thought or reflection. The presence of imagination, 
suggesting that thought faces possible alternatives, means 
that the thought is not perfectly logical. And thus imag- 
ination becomes the mark of a mind defectively logical; 
for the intellectualist defectively intelligent. 

A writer of popular detective stories of a few years ago 
desiring to present his detective (always the same person) 
as the ideal of cold-blooded thinking called him ‘The 
Thinking-Machine”. This, I should say, unwittingly 
states the case. Why this so-called logical process should 
be venerated as the truest revelation of the world of the 


138 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


spirit is more than I can see. For conceived in his perfec- 
tion what we find before us in the person of the “logi- 
cal thinker’? is—not indeed any metaphorical ‘“thinking- 
machine” but literally the machine itself. The logician 
Jevons betrayed this implication when he invented the logi- 
cal machine. Had he lived later he would have found his 
logical machine, in one form at least, ready to hand in the 
adding-machine which we see at the bank. This alone of 
all beings in heaven and earth exhibits the perfection of 
“logical” thinking. In it the intellectual process is never 
corrupted by personal choice—just because it does not 
think. 

This is not to say, however (God forbid! ), that mathe- 
maticians do not think, but only that they are not thinking 
when they are “thinking mathematically”. I will not pre- 
tend to a too close acquaintance with the mental operations 
of mathematicians, nor will I venture to say what signifi- 
cance attaches in the last analysis to the beauty and elegance 
of their forms and relations. Modern mathematics one is 
constrained to accept as a mystery, like transubstantiation, 
known only to the initiated, who on the other hand seem 
unable to explain it. Yet I will venture to suggest that 
the relation of logic to thinking may be illustrated generally, 
with application to mathematicians among others, by con- 
trasting any schoolboy’s presentation of his ‘‘original”’ 
proof of a geometrical proposition—given A is B, to prove 
that M is N—with his process of arriving at the proof. 
Heaven only knows how many foolish ideas, how many 
genial suggestions—involving perhaps “‘illicit’’ operations, 
such as drawing lines for the purpose of getting a hint of 
the terms of the proof—may have entered into the process. 
The completed demonstration, supposing it to be presented 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 139 


in good logical form, would have you believe that the lad’s 
mind could never have contemplated going from “A is B” 
to “M is N” by any but the most direct route and that on 
the way his imagination has never once been deflected from 
the path directly ahead. This, however, as even the 
logicians will tell us, exhibits not the process of thinking 
but the results of thinking—the practical results, I should 
add, marking also the point at which thinking stops. 

Thus also the perfected machine marks the end of the 
inventor’s thinking; something very useful indeed, but from 
the standpoint of thinking no longer worth thinking about. 
One is tempted to say that the logical demonstration is the 
corpse of thinking presentably laid out for burial. But 
perhaps the better figure would be the gentleman in evening 
dress who would give you the impression that this is a sim- 
ply logical derivation from his personality. Any real 
activity of intelligence, in brief, is a genial operation, a 
process of trial and error, full of foolishness as well as of 
seriousness, of comedy and often of tragedy. The logical 
presentation of thought is that aspect of the process which 
we venture to make public. 


§ 36 


For myself, then, I seem compelled to say that there is 
only one kind of intelligence, namely, personal intelligence. 
And if this be true, then it will follow that the attitude 
towards the world in which the “intellectual” ideal is sup- 
posed to be embodied—the impersonal, scientific, matter-of- 
fact attitude—is either unintelligent or not so impersonal 
as it seems. The latter is what I suspect. But to make 
the intent of the distinction clear, let us assume once more 
that there are two kinds of intelligence; and let us say now 


140 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


that the two kinds are manifested respectively in the know- 
ing of things and in the knowing of persons. Scientific 
intelligence is manifested in the knowing of things; per- 
sonal, or humane, intelligence in the knowing of persons. 

On this score I claim a certain respectable intelligence for 
my kitten. And if I were attempting to estimate the in- 
telligence, say, of a fifteen-year-old boy, I doubt if I should 
be greatly interested in his manipulation of gasoline motors 
or radios. I might not indeed care to look too closely into 
his taste for literature or his ability as a literary critic, 
since these things are more or less a matter of circumstance 
and education. But I should think it relevant to ask how 
certainly he grasps the meaning of anything said to him, 
whether in jest or in earnest; and in particular I should 
ask how well, when he is entrusted with a commission, he 
understands the meaning of his instructions as distinct 
from the letter. How safely can you rely upon him to do 
the wise thing in an unexpected contingency? How far 
does he really understand you? 

This will suggest my reply to those who object that for 
intelligence in the proper sense I am substituting “‘taste’’, 
or “culture”, or perhaps “mere feeling”, which is then by 
a tour de force labelled ‘‘intelligence”. I do indeed select 
the manifestations of taste and culture, so far as they are 
genuine, perhaps also of feeling, as the best expressions of 
intelligence; and these as against ‘‘intellect” and “‘science’’. 
But such manifestations I take to be not exclusive or 
peculiar but only finer developments of that intelligent in- 
sight, that intelligent common sense (not crude common 
sense), which has been illustrated above in our intelligent 
lad. And this means that taste and culture (and likewise 
feeling) are in the true and proper sense to be regarded as 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 141 


operations of intelligence and of knowledge—in the true 
and proper sense of marking an awareness of realities not 
myself. 

For it is naive to suppose, as it seems many persons do, 
that the exercise of taste is something which, as distin- 
guished from any operation of science, is concerned only 
with the state of one’s soul; that it marks only an ecstasy 
of appreciation; or a state of the soul directed, if directed 
at all, upon such abstractions as beauty, harmony, sublim- 
ity. ‘To appreciate Wordsworth is not merely to be tickled 
by Wordsworth; not merely to be stimulated by Wordsworth 
to thoughts of the sublime; it is in any case to know Words- 
worth, to grasp objectively the workings of Wordsworth’s 
mind. To appreciate Plato’s ‘Republic’, nay to read the 
“Republic” in any sense worth mentioning, is not merely to 
apprehend certain facts about the history of political theory 
or what not; nor yet to indulge in a private exercise of criti- 
cal powers upon a book—it is merely puerile to suppose 
that when you read Plato you are reading a book; but to 
read the ‘‘Republic” is to form an acquaintance with Plato. 
And it is no less true that to enjoy or to appreciate a 
Beethoven symphony is to enter into the mind of the man 
Beethoven. Of all of these so-called “appreciations” I in- 
sist that either they are knowledge or they are nonsense. 
They stand for real knowledge and real intelligence if per- 
sons are real. And if persons are real at all—if, in other 
words, there be a moral world—they stand for an intel- 
ligence inseparable from morality. 

But personal intelligence is critical intelligence. And 
it is the critical quality that makes intelligence an operation 
distinctively “moral”. For I suppose it will be admitted 
that any moral world is a world of relations among persons, 


142 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


and many are content to define morality simply as the ad- 
justment of personal relations. But the adjustment of per- 
sonal relations—above all, of the very personal relations of 
married life—what is this but a process of criticism without 
end? For a person is never a finality; never, therefore, a 
fact which may be defined once for all and then counted 
upon to remain what itis. It is an elementary fact of the 
personal life, at any stage and of any person, that life is a 
process of reflection, a constant transition from “what one 
is’ to a consciousness of what one is; and then one is some- 
what other than before. Of the more interesting persons 
of our world, perhaps of any persons to whom we can come 
sufficiently close, this is obvious; and it is their charm. 
However deeply we see into their souls there remains ever 
something new just beyond in the form of a fascinating 
problem. The same is true of the world of literary, his- 
torical, and artistic criticism. Of the knowable facts about 
Plato’s life there may conceivably be a final statement, but 
Plato himself will be a problem for criticism to the end of 
time. 

Now it is precisely this critical aspect of intelligence 
which, as I suggested above, leads us to think of all in- 
telligence as the wisdom of the serpent. The natural man 
is suspicious of criticism. And before I listen to another 
man’s criticism of my motives I may very reasonably wish 
to have some assurance of his competence as a critic. He 
might demonstrate his competence by understanding my 
motives, and this demonstration would disarm suspicion. 
But in the end the really important criticism is my own 
criticism. Alas! it is the serpent within that disturbs re- 
pose. Of the identity of morality and intelligence this is 
the most distinctively moral consequence. For the self- 


THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 143 


satisfied, for those who conceive that they have taken the 
final measure both of their fellows and of themselves, there 
is no salvation. ‘They are dead souls. The moral process 
is a process of endless inner inquiry, of never-ending self- 
criticism. This is what we mean by the development of 
character. And this is clearly what was meant by Socrates 
when to the statement that virtue is knowledge he added 
the deeply ironical ‘Know thyself.”” To know yourself is 
to be committed to a task that will have no end. 

And this will then give the answer to those many persons 
who think that to conceive morality as intelligence is to 
convert morality into a mean and calculating prudence. By 
prudence they mean a calculation of the external conditions 
of life which assumes that the motives of life are once for 
all simple. Such indeed is precisely the intelligence as- 
sumed by the utilitarian school of ethics. By this school 
morality is conceived as a process of developing the means 
of life’s satisfactions while the motives to be satisfied remain 
forever fixed; and fixed, therefore, at the point of simple 
sense-gratification. 

A grim insistence upon the unchangeable baseness of 
human nature is the distinctive characteristic of the moral 
philosophy of Hobbes. On one occasion Hobbes created 
a difficulty for himself by giving sixpence to a beggar. 
“Would you have done this if it had not been Christ’s 
command?” he was asked. ‘‘ ‘Yea,’ said he. ‘Why?’ quoth 
the other. ‘Because,’ said he, ‘I was in pain to consider the 
condition of the old man; and now my alms, giving him 
relief, doth also ease me.’”’ I suspect that Hobbes was 
here risking his immortal soul on behalf of philosophical 
consistency. But such at any rate is the theory of prudence. 
What it means is that whatever light Hobbes might get 


144 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


upon the outer world nothing could possibly throw further 
light upon himself or reveal a more generous motive than 
“ease”. A curiously arbitrary limitation of intelligence, if 
you stop to think of it, and hardly to be identified with an 
“enlightened”’ self-interest; yet undeniably convenient. It 
is not true, alas! that the comforts and advantages of pru- 
dence are for the intelligent; they are reserved for the self- 
satisfied stupid. 

To those who are accustomed to formulate morality as 
“doing good to others’, “loving your neighbor’, or “‘trust- 
ing your fellow-man”’, this view of the moral as the critical 
attitude will, I dare say, seem repellent. Yet what is meant 
by a love and confidence which dispenses with critical in- 
sight—what the spiritual realities are here conceived to be 
—is more than I can comprehend. I should like to be able 
to offer a more intimate illustration. But I recall, as it 
happens, a schoolmaster, the proprietor of a small school, 
who once said to me, “I must admit that I am not im- 
partially just to my boys. I am often compelled to grant 
the requests of influential parents, releasing their sons from 
obligations to which the other boys are held. But I try to 
be as just as I can.”’ Does such a confession repel or at- 
tract? JI must confess that this piece of confidence has left 
me with a deep respect for this gentleman and with a warm 
sense of personal understanding. He was, by the way, a 
true gentleman, a conscientious and effective teacher, much 
respected by his boys, and the profits of his school were 
probably little more than a living. And I compare my 
feeling with regard to him with my distrust of the more 
usual schoolmaster, who never admits injustice, and is 
probably never aware of it, because his sense of justice is 
not too highly developed. 


THE WISDOM OB-TIHE SERPENT 145 


It is often said, when other justification seems lacking, 
that we love our friends for their weaknesses. ‘‘Weak- 
nesses”’ I suspect to be a mark of deference to authoritarian 
morality. I should prefer to say that we love our friends 
for what they are. And we love them—we are close to 
them—just because we know so well what they are, because 
we know that they know, and that they know that we know 
—hbecause, in one word, there is intelligence between us. 


CHAPTER X 
THE BEAUTY OF VIRTUE 


§ 37. Aesthetic taste and moral law. §38. The experience of 
beauty and virtue. §39. The beauty of utility. §40. The moral 
ground of aesthetic criticism. 

ORALITY, truth, beauty; or conscience, intel- 
ligence, taste: in saying that among the values 
morality is everywhere my thesis is that any of 

these conceptions when critically interpreted—with a view 
to the meaning underlying the conventional form—will be 
found also to mean each of the others. And thus to say 
that morality, or conscience, is everywhere in life is also 
to say that intelligence and taste are everywhere. 

In this chapter the centre of attention will be beauty, or 
taste. It is not my intention to demonstrate a theory of 
beauty; for which indeed I have too little experience in 
fields specifically aesthetic. I shall be content, in this 
direction, with what may be suggested in the course of 
dealing with some of the customary arguments for regard- 
ing morality as one thing and beauty as another. 


§ 37 


Prominent among the arguments for demonstrating this 
irrelevance of beauty and virtue is the argument which links 
the two conventions, namely, that there is no disputing 
about tastes—de gustibus nil disputandum—and that ‘“‘what 


is right for one is right for all”, into the doctrine that judg- 
146 


Hb BEAU D Vi (Odum VER RU E 147 


ments of beauty are subjective, and therefore not to be 
questioned, while judgments of morality are objective and 
are therefore to be enforced by law. 

That there is no disputing about tastes I take to be 
plainly false, together with the implication that there ought 
to be no disputing about tastes; for if we must dispute 
about anything I wonder what other material for dispute is 
so well worth while. As a matter of fact people are con- 
stantly disputing about tastes, and with hardly less animus 
than in their disputes about morals. It may be doubted 
whether the sternest Puritan hates the evil-doer quite so 
sincerely as the professional aesthete loathes those who pre- 
fer the banal and the vulgar. The aesthete closes the dis- 
cussion with the cool and verbally modest retort, ‘Well, 
our tastes differ’, while the Puritan consigns his opponent 
to the world below; but their meaning is the same. 

And if it be urged that the aesthetic point of view tolerates - 
different genres, or types of beauty, Mozart and Wagner, 
Watteau and Leonardo da Vinci, finding each in its own 
way beautiful, then we must ask, repeating the question 
of earlier chapters, whether the moral point of view does 
otherwise. It is supposed somehow to mark the disin- 
terestedness and liberality peculiar to the aesthetic point of 
view to say, for example, that the lover of Mozart need | 
not quarrel with the lover of Wagner. Not, I should reply, 
until it becomes a practical question of arranging the pro- 
gram of a concert. But it is only upon some practical 
question, concerning the possession of land, or money, or 
the like, that the Anglo-Saxon finds any real need of quar- 
relling with a Russian, the Gentile with the Jew, or the 
capitalist with the laborer. Art as conventionally con- 
ceived is likely to be artificially restricted to such expres- 


y 


148 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


sions as pictures, music, and the like. We forget that art 
may cover the whole of life. In the conventionally re- 
stricted application, different aesthetic tastes can live more 
comfortably in the world together than different moral 
ideals, because they can more easily keep out of one an- 
other’s way. Logically and essentially, however, the 
aesthetic point of view is not more a matter of privacy than 
the moral. 

Persons of taste very commonly distinguish good and 
bad taste—and quite as properly, it seems, as when these 
adjectives are applied to differences of moral character. 
For even in the field of taste it is not enough for a man to 
take his stand upon the simple assertion, This is my taste. 
If he cares to have his assertion respected—and if not why 
should he utter it?-—he must justify his taste; not indeed 
by reference to a standard of taste, but certainly by show- 
ing that when the meaning of his taste is developed (sup- 
pose it to be a cubist or futurist taste) there is revealed a 
consistency and significance of motive of which any interest 
in the world of taste must at least take account. This is 
to give to his assertion an objective significance, objective 
in just the sense in which moral assertions are objective 


» (see § 44). But it is also to incur an obligation. You 


cannot take a stand or make a claim without incurring an 
obligation, and moral obligations rest upon nothing more. 

Persons of taste have also a way of condemning as “‘bad 
taste” conduct which moralistic persons, if they pass any 
judgment on such conduct, would call “wrong”; such as 
wilful disregard of the sensibilities of other persons present 
in the choice of a subject of conversation. What they mean 
by bad taste is, however, really a disregard of moral con- 
siderations. And if you or I prefer the term “taste” in 


THE BEAUTY OF VIRTUE 149 


this connection, it is not for the purpose of ignoring the 
moral aspect of the issue, and of calling it purely aesthetic, 
but simply to claim for the expression of taste a finer and 
deeper insight into the moral values. 

Nor, on the other hand, shall we find many persons to 
assent to “What is right for one is right for all” if this 
principle is to be taken literally to the extent of an absolute 
disregard of the individual conscience. Even Kant, who 
embodied the principle in his “categorical imperative”, had 
to assume that the individual conscience would of its own 
accord ratify the principle. During the World War, when 
absolutism was in the saddle, the principle was applied to 
military service; yet by virtually universal consent exemp- 
tion was accorded to conscientious objectors who could 
demonstrate that their objection was conscientious. It is 
true that the demonstration was reduced more or less to a 
convention, such as membership in the Society of Friends 
or other religious body committed to pacifistic teaching. 
Yet the convention itself was significant. Morality is not 
“objective” in the sense of disregarding personal taste, 
conviction, and point of view. And yet in a truer sense 
morality is indeed objective. Any modification of de- 
mands to fit a particular person may require him to show 
that he is really what he claims to be, a pacifist by in- 
dependent conviction and not a pacifist for the present 
emergency, created by the demand for military service. 
If you are to be a pacifist in time of war you must also be 
a pacifist in time of peace; and your life must show that 
you are essentially a man of peace. To meet this test the 
Quakers could point to a consistent policy of pacifism, 
embodied in a religious conviction, covering two centuries. 
The fact that the claim was allowed at a time when all 


150 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


exemptions were disputed, shows that, even when emer- 
gency seems to strengthen the principle, we are not quite 
ready to assert that what is right for one is right for all. 
In brief, then, it is not true that morality is ‘purely 
objective” or that beauty is “purely subjective’. It is not 
true that morality is absolute obligation, beauty mere choice. 
‘In the moral world or in the world of beauty, every choice 
involves an obligation, every obligation rests upon a choice. 


§ 38 


That beauty and virtue are irrelevant is said, however, 
to be a matter of common fact and experience. Since we 
may no longer speak with Aristotle of the “virtue” (e. g.) 
of a watch or an automobile, the comparison must be 
mainly in terms of human beauty; and since in our day 
we prefer not to apply the term “beauty” to men (a very 
significant illustration, by the way, of the conventional 
limitations of the term), we find the question concentrated 
upon the relation of beauty and virtue in women. Now, 
passing in review most of the beautiful women of whom 
we have read, beginning with Helen of Troy, it seems at 
first glance that the observation must be true: beauty and 
virtue need not, at any rate, go together. 

> But moral philosophy is not limited to the first glance, 
nor again to what are called the plain facts of experience. 
Of the aesthetic quality of these plain facts I shall have 
something to say in the next chapter. Here I will say 
that appreciations of beauty, at any rate, are not such 
~ plain facts. They are not something stamped upon us 
instantaneously once for all as by a rubber stamp, but 
highly complicated and subtle continuing processes. Any 


ThE BEAUTY 10m VLEET UE 151 


appreciation worthy to be called a judgment of beauty is 
developed through a series of experiences. I hear Richard 
Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” for the first time 
(harking back twenty years), and I loathe it; the second 
time, and I wonder about it; the third time, and I am 
deeply impressed by it. On the other hand the seasonal 
popular song may upon first hearing have all the spark- 
ling charm of a freshly opened bottle of champagne; to 
be flatter after a week than stale champagne. It might be 
a good rule of thumb to say that the test of beauty is its 


b 


staying power. But this would be only a crude way of * 


saying that the test of true beauty is reflective experience: 
reflective analysis and reflective taste. 

And this means that the question of beauty and virtue 
is not a question of whether they are found apart as a 
matter of unreflective fact—while beauty and vice, virtue 
and ugliness, rest comfortably together—but a question 
whether they can remain apart in the course of reflective 
experience and reflective taste. My thesis is that they 
cannot remain apart. You may easily say upon first ac- 
quaintance that this woman is wonderfully beautiful, while 
yet you know her to be treacherous and false. ‘There is 
nothing that we may not say while the vocal organs re- 
main unimpaired. “Beautiful” and “treacherous and 
false” are thus far for you only a word and a phrase. 
The question is whether beauty will be an experience after 
“treacherous and false” has also become an experience. 

And for the answer we need not quite passively wait 
for the bitter experience. We may try what Royce called 
a “thought-experiment”, or an experiment in imagination 
—where, I suspect, the decisive experiments are usually 


152 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


performed. As one form of experiment I will propose that 
you take the following sentences: 

A lovely and beautiful woman. 

A beautiful woman, but what a liar! 

A beautiful woman, but stupid as a beast! 

Then ask yourself whether these three women are equally 
beautiful and equally likely to remain beautiful upon 
further acquaintance. 

To carry out the experiment I will ask my male reader 
to suppose that by some mischance he had married the 
second or the third of these beautiful women. Is it a bad 
guess that after a year or two we should find him contem- 
plating with ironical amusement the fact that other men 
thought her beautiful? On the other hand suppose a man 
to have married a beautiful woman with a rather dis- 
reputable ‘“‘past” and then to have found in her a loyal 
wife, an intelligent and sympathetic companion: must we 
not suppose that any jealous bitterness with regard to her 
past will be modified, at least, by the thought that it was 
a tribute to her loveliness? And must he not also then 
conclude that chastity in women is a virtue rather over- 
rated? It should be remembered that no youth under the 
spell of an infatuation doubts that his siren is good. She 
is not the conventionally “good woman”, but then why 
should she be? In any case it seems that when beauty 
is associated with vice and virtue with ugliness there is a 
mistake somewhere. Suppose, once more, that in the 
midst of the description of a person in a novel you read 
that “his countenance which expressed nobility and intelli- 
gence was ugly and repulsive’—surely, before accepting 
this, you would read the sentence twice. 

How, then, do we come to believe that beauty is one 


TILE BEAU TV AOR VIRTUE L5G 


thing and virtue another? Because, I will suggest, the 
question as commonly treated is referred not to our ex- 
perience of beauty and virtue but to conventions of beauty 
and virtue. The moral world of daily intercourse is 
peopled largely by dramatic conventions—such as ‘“‘the 
clever rogue” and “‘the simple honest man”. In the world 
of conventions the moral man is the “Puritan”. The in- 
telligent man is represented by Mephistopheles or Iago— 
or by Edison. And the aesthetic man is the disciple of 
Oscar Wilde wearing long hair and a red carnation. But 
in the special question of morality and beauty I suspect 
that, even by more discerning persons, the issue is con- 
ceived vaguely as lying between the Ten Commandments 
and the Parthenon; or between Christianity and paganism. 
Morality is conceived as the special and peculiar property 
of the ancient Hebrew people, beauty as the exclusive 
property of the Greeks. This is a strange assumption if 
you pause to think of it; stranger than the assumption of 
one race of people born blind, another born deaf—since 
these functions can easily be separated. It is upon such 
an assumption, however, that the Greek profile comes to 
be the standard of human beauty, the Puritan (whose 
views of life are mainly from the Old Testament) the 
standard of goodness—as if God had by a frat fixed the 
standard type of beauty once for all and had thus ordained 
that beauty of countenance should be forever unattainable 
by a negro, an American Indian, or even by an Anglo- 
Saxon! 

If this be the issue of beauty versus virtue, it is clear 
enough that the two need not go together. Yet I suppose 
that all of us have known persons whose faces bore all 
the conventional marks of ugliness, whom nevertheless we 


4 


154 MORALE HOS Or HW 


have found to be altogether attractive and delightful, noble 
and high-minded. And after learning to know them we 
have not merely tolerated their ugliness, or put it out of 
our minds. Rather we have come to find it fascinating and 
significant, their faces “‘distinguished’’, if not now vaguely 
beautiful. And thus perhaps we have come to see what is 
meant by saying that beauty is a matter of mere association, 
or convention. It is precisely “‘a mere convention” so 
far as beauty is a matter of standard, habit, or fashion. 
And then we see too that if all the snub-nosed men had 
the genial wisdom of Socrates, while all the Greek profiles 
marked the “Hoi Polloi”, it would presently become diffi- 
cult to see in a snub-nose an aesthetic defect or in a Greek 
profile a mark of beauty. Suppose that all of the lovely 
and delightful women weighed more than two hundred and 
twenty-five—or less than a hundred: what is now referred 
to in a pitying whisper as “obesity” or “‘scrawniness’’, as 
the case may be, would soon be hailed openly as a mark 
of transcendent beauty. The cynical critic may object 
that “nature” would still fasten the sexual attraction to the 
Venus of Milo or, better, to the lovely ‘‘Sleeping Venus” 
of Giorgione. But if he is right (and the many divaga- 
tions of sexual passion suggest that he is wrong), it would 
mean only that sexual attraction had lost its last shred 
of sentiment or of moral significance. 

Yet the question is after all not quite exclusively con- 
cerned with the beauty of persons. The souls of persons 
are expressed also in objects either of art or of use made 
by- human hands. And here it is a question, not quite of 
beauty and utility, as we shall presently see, but of beauty 
and significance, involving the question of sincerity. 
We face here the perplexing question of decoration, or 


THe BEAU LYAOn VLR TUE 155 


adornment. Such indeed is the power of habit and asso- 
ciation that things continue to give the impression of 
beauty after they have ceased to be significant. A coat- 
sleeve without buttons still looks ugly, though the buttons 
have long since ceased to function. A generation ago, 
after side-pockets had disappeared from cut-away coats, 
it seemed that beauty still demanded the pocket-flaps. 

Yet mere “impression” is never final in the life of a 
conscious being. The pocket-flaps have now disappeared. 
Within little more than five years the bobbed-haired girl 
has begun to be beautiful; and I wonder if we may not 
soon begin to think of a rich and luxuriant mass of hair, 
so impressive to Victorian taste, as a stupid and uncom- 
fortable survival of the aesthetics of primitive man. At 
any rate when the conviction of absurdity is become finally 
clear the impression of beauty is dissipated. There are 
modern office-buildings which present a fine appearance of 
massiveness, gigantic columns at the entrance seeming 
fittingly to support the many stories of wall above them. 
But no architectural genius avails to preserve this impres- 
sion of massive beauty in the mind of one who knows— 
7. €., that the columns support nothing and that the walls 
are like so much wall-paper, set into and supported by the 
steel frame of the building. 

Once more, this is not to say that beauty is merely sub- 
conscious utility. Beauty, we shall see presently, is if 
anything deliberately chosen utility—which is quite an- 
other matter. I have read that Henry Ward Beecher used 
to carry with him a small bag of gems for the sheer delight 
of handling them and feasting his eyes upon their colors. 
For myself I can sympathize with the man who is willing 
to pay the price, and forego something else, for the 


156 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


pleasure of having his clothes made of those fine, soft, 
fluffy woolens so caressing to the hand that rests upon the 
knee—provided that he will not then basely turn about and 
explain that such cloths wear longer. And so if the lover 
of the massive appearance should claim that this gives 
delight and comfort to the eye I shall conceive his taste 
to be justified if he can explain himself. Unfortunately 
for his explanation, it seems that the appeal is here not to 
the eye but to the mind. The beauty of the massive 
columns lies in what they suggest, and what they suggest 
is false.* 


§ 39 


The question of the beauty of virtue brings with it the 
question of the beauty of utility. In what has just been 
said reference was made to the view that beauty is only 
a kind of refined utility, utility in the larger view. And 
among those holding this view, it seems we must reckon 
Croce, who says that an object is beautiful “if perfectly 
adapted to its practical purpose”. Now it is quite possi- 
ble, I should say, to hold that beauty is only a larger view 
of utility if we utter the word “only” with a certain accent 
of caution and of irony—if, that is to say, we have taken 
into account the possibly revolutionary character of the 
transformation effected by the larger view. For my own 
part I prefer the so-called beauty of utility, I dislike all 
adornment, and I am suspicious of “objects of art’. 


1In A Theory of Knowledge (1923), p. 89, C. A. Strong says, referring to 
the kind of considerations just mentioned, that this “is to forget that our 
enjoyment of it [i.e., architecture] is, after all, primarily a pleasure of see- 
ing.” Does he mean seeing without imagination—is this aesthetic enjoyment? 
How, then, does aesthetic enjoyment differ from the purely sensual? But if 
imagination is involved I wonder how he manages to halt the mental process 
at the point of merely seeing. 


THEO BEAUTY: OF VIETUE How 


Beauty, I will say with Croce, is perfect adaptation to the=- 
practical purpose. And this seems to me a comfortably 
simple and definite view—until I endeavor to state for 
myself the meaning of the practical purpose. 

When the practical man explains that a writing-table, 
for example, is for him purely a matter of utility, it is 
pertinent to ask how sensitively he has questioned his 
need for the writing-table. He thinks possibly that a 
packing-box turned on its side would really serve the pur- 
pose and that anything more is a concession to reputability. 
If so we may point out to him that a packing-box would 
probably be unsteady—to build a solid and durable piece 
of furniture is, by the way, a matter of engineering art 
and skill. The rough surface would offer impediments 
to writing and to the easy disposition of papers, and it 
would be unpleasant to touch. It would also gather dirt. 
We might go further and suggest that, if the table is to 
be used for any length of time, it should be of a color 
and form comfortable to the eye. Here the practical 
man will doubtless object that we are introducing consid- 
erations that go beyond utility. Perhaps he is one of those 
who can see the utility of a warm overcoat, but despises 
the silk lining which makes the coat so much easier to put 
on and off (thus mitigating the nuisance of an overcoat) 
and so much more comfortable on the body. Then we 
may ask why the appeal to certain sensibilities is to be 
described as purely utilitarian, to certain others as purely 
aesthetic. Why is the convenience of the writing-table to 
be credited to its utility, an unpleasing color and form to 
be charged against its beauty? Or why is the noise of my 
typewriter to be accounted a merely aesthetic defect? If 
our practical man boasts that he is untouched by these 


158 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


so-called aesthetic defects, alas! that means, I fear, that 
he wishes to be classed among the cruder forms of animal 
life. If, on the other hand, he undertakes to question 

> his need for the writing-table deeply and then to satisfy 
this need completely, he will discover at the end, I think, 
that he has achieved a work of art and created a thing of 
beauty, if he has not also expended a considerable sum 
of money. 

> From utility to beauty is then, I should say, a passage 
from the crude mechanism of life to life itself; from the 
relatively unconsidered gratification of desire to its 
deliberately conscious gratification; in other words, from 
the uncritical to the critical life. Utility, as I have pointed 
out above, marks the presence of ends taken for granted. 
‘When the practical man says, This serves my practical 
purpose (and there is no more to be said), what he means 
is that the purpose itself is not to be questioned. But this 
means, not that it really satisfies any purpose intimately 
personal, but that it removes a present difficulty and en- 
ables life in some fashion to go on. The “strictly utili- 
tarian” consideration is limited to what will just pass. 
If he will refer the question seriously to his own purpose, 
asking, say, What must this writing-table be if it is to 
be comprehensively satisfying, and satisfying to me? he will 
discover that his purpose implies much more than any 
conventional utility has provided for. It is only by an 
artificial limitation—imposed perhaps by business con- 
siderations of time or money—that he can exclude from 
the purpose of this or that object of use any of the purpose 
of his life. Then he will discover that nothing manu- 
factured will really serve his purpose, nothing indeed but 
a work of art created by himself, embodying and expressing 


TH EAB EAUTIV OREVER TUE 159 


his personal life as that life is already embodied in his 
face and his hands. And when from this point of view 
he recalls the original “practical purpose” it seems now 
that the practical purpose represented only a schematic 
outline of life, workable indeed, yet from the standpoint 
of life itself a kind of caricature, and related to life much 
as a saw-horse is related to a real horse or as the painter’s 
manikin is related to what he will express with his brush. 

This means, again, that from utility to beauty is a 
passage from the dumb, relatively speaking, to the con- 
sciously articulate. Art, as Croce says, is expression.’ 
This element of expression will be clearer if from the prac- 
tical man’s writing-table we turn our attention to his coat. 
When a man says, A coat is for me a matter of pure 
utility, and therefore I consider nothing but price, dura- 
bility, and warmth, it means either that he forgets or that 
he will deny that the clothes express the man. The fact, 
that a man is indeed known by his clothes, he can hardly 
deny. He may condemn the fact as standing for an 
artificial association; but then he may have to explain 
why the use of c-a-t to indicate a certain soft furry animal 
with claws is not the product of an association even more 
artificial. When the consciousness of expression is borne 
home to him it seems that, simply as an honest man, he is 
faced with a problem; which is now indistinguishably 
an aesthetic and a moral problem. He may seek to evade 
the problem by wearing only the most neutral of coats. 
But hardly with success. It does not indeed follow that 
a severely plain choice in matters of dress and household 
equipage marks an insensibility to beauty; it may mark 
only a mute rejection, despairing or contemptuous, of the 
satisfactions available. But any attitude whatever implies 


160 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


a certain judgment, which is both moral and aesthetic, upon 
the values represented in the current conceptions of life. 


§ 40 


Finally it will be said on behalf of the separateness of 
beauty and virtue, but mainly now for the protection of 
, art and beauty, that it is not the function of art to teach 
.moral lessons. But neither, if I am right, is this the 
function of moral philosophy. And here I think we have 
the root of the whole matter: the separation of beauty and 
virtue is inspired mainly by a fear of that authoritarian 
conception of morality which defines virtue as right con- 
duct and makes it the function of ethics to ‘‘teach”’. 

Yet, though it is not the artist’s function to teach, it 
is surely his function to express; and if not moral lessons, 
then impressions, conceptions, appreciations of life; and 
thus to express what is in the most significant sense moral. 
If moral philosophy is a study of life, I think we must 
find in art and literature, and most clearly in poetry and 
fiction, its most important experimental laboratory; and 
to me a study of the aims and motives of literary criticism 
reveals far more adequately than most of the treatises on 
ethics the distinctive logic and motif of the ‘‘moral” world. 
There is indeed a superficial literary criticism which is 
concerned with style—and a more superficial study of 
literature which, seeking to be accounted scientific, calls 
itself philology. But the style is after all the man. And 
the fundamental peculiarity of any distinctively “literary” 
treatment of a subject—that which makes it seem so 
trivial and unworthy to any properly scientific mind—is 
just that it tends to regard the form and even the subject- 
matter of any writing as somewhat less interesting than the 


PHBE AUT Va-O.b) VLR DUE 161 


mind and personality of the writer himself. And thus the ~ 


really critical question for literary criticism becomes’ the 
question of the man himself and his outlook upon life. 

I have referred above to the Carlylean ‘‘strong man’. 
When we “study Carlyle” the chief point of interest 
is—just Carlyle. In his ‘Heroes’, in ‘Frederick the 
Great’’, in the Abbot Samson of ‘“‘Past and Present” he has 
given us Carlyle’s own ideal of man; and what is more, a 
comprehensive view of what he conceives to be worth while 
in human life. His style is a subject for dispute. But 
this is only to say that Carlyle is a conspicuous illustration 


of the fact that the style is the man. So long as you find * 


a suggestion of worth and greatness in his presentation of 
life you will find him eloquent and impressive; and while 


he remains eloquent he remains significant. If this im-- 


pression is dissipated his eloquence becomes tirade. 
Likewise of Dickens. What makes “David Copper- 
field” to most persons the most impressive of his novels is 
the fact that there clearly you have Dickens himself. In 
his characters and in their difficulties the writer of fiction 
reveals his personal conception of the problem of life. 
If you are a lover of Dickens and rank him as in some 
manner a true artist it means that in the sober middle- 
class ideals that stand forth in his pages and in his 
sympathetic handling of lower-class life you find some 
of the value and essence of genuine humanity; and if you 
dismiss him as a sentimentalist, it means that you question 
the significance of middle and lower-class virtue. I 
suppose, again, that Arthur Pendennis is largely Thackeray 
himself—Thackeray taking himself humorously yet none 
the less offering an apologia. Pendennis, I fancy, is just 
the sort of decent, wholesome, yet withal clever and in- 


162 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


telligent young Englishman most congenial to Thackeray’s 
taste. He is not quite a man of genius, and he is no 
hero; but this only means that Thackeray has no very high 
appreciation of heroes—a moral estimate, be it noted, in 
which there will be others to agree with him. 

Granting that seemingly great artists are sometimes 
seemingly the most immoral of men—seemingly, I mean, 
for the first look—it will be no less true that the final 
estimate of the art will coincide closely with the final esti- 
mate of the man. One cannot remain for long an admirer 
of Villon and also a Puritan moralist. Nor, again, will 
Tolstoi’s four volumes of “War and Peace” remain an 
artistic monstrosity for one who has come to share Tolstoi’s 
belief in a mystical humanity, the life of which is revealed 
not in the passing acts of individuals but in the slower 
movements of nations and races; by one, in other words, 
whose moral ideal for the individual is self-effacement 
and absorption of self into humanity. For my own 
part, though I find Balzac’s novels fascinating and com- 
pelling when once I am past the beginning, I cannot rate 
him as the great artist that his admirers usually find in 
him; and mainly because to my taste his slavish admira- 
tion of the manners of high life casts a blemish of vul- 
garity upon nearly every scene. And I have little ap- 
preciation of the much-praised “art” of de Maupassant 
because it seems to me that his “effects”, so far from in- 
dicating either breadth or depth of experience of life, are 
just the customary shallow tricks of the newspaper feature- 
writer. On the other hand, I am disposed to rate 
Tourgenieff as a very great artist because I seem to find 
in him (possibly indeed because I know him to have been 
a serious student of philosophy) a background of gravity 


ThHEeha BE AUT. 7 O Bsa VLR E 163 


and brooding contemplation, a sense of the tragic com- &~ 
plexity of all human motive, which gives suggestiveness to 
the simplest of his sketches of Russian country life and 
to his revolutionists, such as Basarof and Roudine, a 
significance almost Shakespearian. 

Any of these judgments of mine may be disputed. But 
it will be found, I think, that the ground of the dispute ~ 
will include the moral ground. It will be claimed that I : 
have wrongly estimated not merely the artist but the man. 


CHAPTER XI 
THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 


§ 41. Aesthetic impressions and scientific facts. §42. History as 
a branch of art. 


NE of the more obvious objections to any concep- 
tion of the unity of the spirit is that which takes 
the form of saying that there is no element either 

of the moral or of the aesthetic, no element of choice or of 
taste, in our knowledge of facts. Facts, it is said, are in 
no sense formed or created, they are simply given. The 
question is too large for comprehensive treatment, and the 
present brief chapter is merely to suggest what can be said 
for the thesis that knowledge of fact involves creative 
imagination. This suggestion I will convey through a 
more or less free rendering of Croce’s theory of “impres- 
sions” and of his seemingly paradoxical theory that his- 
tory is a branch of art. 


§ 41 


According to Croce art is expression; the expression of 
an impression, as he also says—that and nothing more. 
This means that in a certain perhaps proper sense of the 
word art is absolutely democratic. A peasant or a duke, 
a mill-worker or a poet, a hotel-waiter or a gentleman-and- 
scholar—one subject has as much of the possibility of 
beauty in him as the other. There is no intrinsically ugly. 


And thus Croce takes issue with an authoritarian aesthetics 
164 


THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 165 


which, like authoritarian ethics, believes that God in his 
wisdom has put a finer kind of human nature into some 
frames than into others and has marked each with an 
appropriate sign.* 

But he also faces a scepticism more coldly factual. Art 
the communication of impressions! one may exclaim. 
What nonsense! When the cook tells me that she finds in 
the refrigerator only one pound of butter and four eggs 
she communicates an impression, but the communication is 
not art. It seems (so runs the objection) that Croce has’ 
missed the difference between two kinds of impressions. 
On the one hand we have the painter’s impression of a 
landscape, or of a person, which he tries to express on 
canvas. Of this kind are the properly aesthetic impres- 
sions, and these we welcome as art. On the other hand 
are those ordinary impressions of matter of fact which the 
psychologist calls sensations, or sense-perceptions. The 
communication of these impressions is not art but plain 
information, or perhaps science. 

Now to the reader of Croce it will be clear that he has 
not for a moment forgotten this difference. It is rather 
the chief purpose of his argument to show that this differ- 
ence, the difference between the aesthetic and the matter- 
of-fact impression, is not in the last analysis a real 
difference. At best it is a difference of degree and cir- 
cumstance. And if we remember that in the Greek the 
term “aesthetic” covers both the artistic impression and 
the matter-of-fact perception we shall find ourselves asking 
whether after all every experience of matter of fact is not 


1 Here let me repeat a caveat. Croce also offends authoritarian ethics by 
teaching “art for art’s sake’—along with, as it happens, “duty for duty’s 
sake”. This blind service of two irresponsible masters implies that art is 
irrelevant to morality, and this it is my chief purpose to disprove. 


166 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


in its own measure an artistic experience. If so it will 
mean that all of our experience is in its own measure— 
so far indeed as it is any conscious experience—aesthetic 
experience; in other words, that all experience is, just as 
experience, a “‘sense of life’’. 

This I believe to be profoundly true, but how to make it 
demonstratively true is another matter. For in most of 
our experience we seem to take the world just as it is given, 
most of all the world of common fact. Here we talk about 
“data” and ‘presentations’. And here at least it seems 
that the mind is truly a tabula rasa, taking what comes 
just as it comes, without exercise of taste, with no regard 
for taste; nay, forewarned—by the scientist and the logi- 
cian, by the psychiatrist, and most effectively by the brutal 
common sense of the plain man—against any exercise of 
taste. And thus the word “impression” comes to mean an 
inertly passive experience, to be described not as an activity 
of mind but as a “mental state’’. 

Yet to any one initiated into the practice of self- 
consciousness, to one become curious about his ‘‘mental 
states’, it will be clear, I think, that the passive character 
of the perceptive ‘‘states” is chiefly a convention. Even 
those who insist most upon the “given” character of sense- 
experience recognize the seeming activity of “apperception”’, 
or selective attention. But what this means we may best 
realize in the fatigue that follows a multitude of impres- 
sions—for example, after a day spent in a comfortable 
Pullman car. Then it seems that, so far from receiving 
passive impressions, it has required a day-long strain of 
attention to keep our world straight through a welter of 
shifting scenes. Here at least, it seems that the world 
is not given to us in a rational, intelligible, and harmonious 


THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 167 


picture. We have to form the picture. And to form an 
intelligible picture out of the daily run of modern ex- 
perience is often a terrible effort. A pupil of mine just 
recovering from nervous prostration told me that in 
Chicago, where he lived, he could not venture down into 
the business district, since the sign-boards alone were too 
much for him. One need not succumb to nervous prostra- 
tion to understand this. 

‘Perception of fact is not, then, as it seems, a case of 
having an impression stamped upon us; it is always a 
process of forming and creating. We do not simply get 
an impression of the world before us, we form an impres- 
sion. If the activity of forming is not always in evidence 
it is because in our transactions with the routine of daily 
fact the process is more or less mechanical and stereotyped. 
It is in the experience of, so to speak, coming back to fact 
that we best catch ourselves in the act of forming. Wak- 
ing from sleep in the morning, especially from a sound 
sleep—if you attend to this, I think you will see that it 
is never instantaneous and never a mere change of state, 
a substitution of one picture for another, but a complex 
and very interesting logical and artistic process of re- 
forming out of chaotic matter a world that you have for 
the time lost. Sitting before the fire, let your mind 
wander; in other words, loosen for a moment your “grip 
on reality”; at once your world, now indeed rather passively 
perceived, assumes shapes most illogical and fantastic; 
suggestions present themselves which at other times never 
even show their faces; and ideas and images (so-called) 
assume new and strange and often forbidden fellowships. 
It is thus, I will suggest, that dreams occur; by a relative 
cessation of the forming process; and thus also the ravings 


168 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


of delirium and the obsessions of the insane. For the 
matter of that, if you are looking for a world of passively 
received impression, a world characterized by the inno- 
cence of the mind, I suspect that in the experience of the 
insane you will find it at its passive best. 

When you have once caught the forming in the act— 
in the process of coming back to fact—you may then, I 
believe, find it, vestigially at least, in half of the percep- 
tions of daily life; especially if you happen to be an 
absent-minded philosopher and college professor whose 
punctual engagements, demanding alertness when they 
occur, are few as compared with those of the business 
man, and who may thus let his mind wander from fact 
a good part of the time. The clock strikes; the telephone 
rings; I need the scissors which lie just before me on the 
desk. Even the scissors I seem not to perceive without a 
complex, though exceedingly rapid, formative activity, 
logical and aesthetic. And if you say, Yes, but it is the 
fact of the scissors that determines the outcome, well, that 
is just the question, the very big question, that I wish to 
suggest as lying in the background. It is true that prac- 
tical perception is confronted by a seemingly resistant 
“matter”, but so also in some degree is artistic creation. 
And it may be that the resistance is a question only of 
my insistent demand for the scissors. For my own part, 
at any rate, I can see no essential difference between com- 
ing back to fact after a night of sleep and coming back to 
any other interrupted activity of the spirit; coming back 
to a pleasant day-dream after an unwelcome ring of the 
telephone, or to the composition of a novel, a poem, or a 
song, a philosophical or a scientific theory. And for a 
typically aesthetic activity give me the process of con- 


THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 169 


structing a scientific theory; for the sake of which obser- 
vations are emphasized here, others minimized there, still 
others (no less factually observations) rejected as positive 
errors, all on behalf of the author’s intuition. Nothing is 
more suggestive of the sculptor’s process of modelling in 
clay. But in all of these cases alike, it seems that coming 
back means only that the course of imagination is resumed. 

It is a persistent illusion—and no less an illusion be- 
cause so necessary to the business of life—that we all live 
in the same world. The illusion is so persistent that even 
for the instructed it requires an effort of imagination to 
realize that an infant six months old in the same room with 
grown-ups cannot see what they see; or that what they see 
could not be seen by an Australian blackfellow suddenly 
set down among them. ‘The ordinary modern living-room 
contains chairs in which we imagine persons to sit—and 
this defines and forms what we see. Again rugs which 
we may imagine to be removed from the floor—as merely 
seen they might as well be built in. Glass bulbs which 
we imagine to become incandescent; a huge box, called 
a piano, which (strangely) we can imagine to give forth 
sweet sounds; and book-shelves displaying rows of rec- 
tangular patches in various colors which we imagine to 
be removable, and then to be capable of developments and 
transformations which our blackfellow would surely at- 
tribute to magic. It would be very interesting to get his 
impression as his eye falls upon the book-shelves. But 
no, I fear it would be very uninteresting; for what I sus- 
pect is that the book-shelves convey to him no impression 
whatever, just as they appear to convey little or no im- 
pression to the infant. 

But what, then, of our own impression? ‘The answer 


170 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


seems to be that our own impression of this apparently 
given and self-existent room is the last expression of an 
infinitely subtle and complex activity of imagination, co- 
ordinately logical and aesthetic, the motives and grounds 
of which we shall never finally bring to light. It is as 
distinctly an artistic product—expressing, if we go into 
the finer points of the character and quality of what we 
see and of what we refuse to see, the nature of our souls 
—as the work of any painter. And as for what is “given” 
as a basis for the activity of imagination—seen and not 
imagined—it seems that nothing is absolutely given. The 
given, the datum, resolves itself in the last analysis into 
a kind of formless something which is saved from being 
nothing only by a seemingly inert stubbornness. The 
room, the object of our formed impression, seems to be 
even less given than the angel which Michelangelo saw 
in the block of marble. 

Croce puts this point neatly, if somewhat too summarily, 
when he disposes of the common idea that the difference 
between the artist and the plain man is a difference of skill 
or technique. This common idea Croce takes to be that, 
while all men see alike, only the artist knows how to express 
what he sees. Against this Croce points out that the 
superiority of the artist lies in what he sees; it is a dif- 
ference not of technique but of vision. This difference 
we can all readily appreciate when it comes to the painting 
of a portrait, especially of one who is near to us. The 
painter’s impression is awaited as a kind of possibly fate- 
ful revelation. But the point applies no less to the cook’s 
humbler impression of the pound of butter and the four 
eggs in the refrigerator. The painter of still life might 
well see more than the cook; and yet the cook’s impression 


PbS ReEAUT VY ORNKNOWLEDGE ity ak 


is also an activity of the human spirit. She too is no 
merely passive photographic plate but, in Croce’s words, 
a creator of life. 

And since (as Croce himself insists) we are all artists, 
the advantages of superior vision will not lie exclusively 
with those who make art their profession. It is a too com- 
mon vice of aesthetic philosophy to consult only the pro- 
fessional artist. The cook may conceivably see something 
in the butter and eggs which is hidden from the painter of 
still life; and the physician may see that in a man’s face 
which the painter happily misses. The criminologist or 
the life-insurance agent may each see something else. And 
in the end what I would emphasize (as expressing my 
own idea, at least) is that every impression of the world is 
an individual impression. It is no doubt practically con- 
venient to assume that we all live in the same world of 
fact, but it marks a lack of imagination if we believe it to 
be true. The machinist and the carpenter, the sailor and 
the miner, the railway-conductor and the salesman, the 
lawyer, the physician, and the clergyman, the zoologist, 
geologist, mathematician, or literary critic—no two of 
these lives in the same world of fact. Each of these 
worlds stands for a certain type of imagination; a certain 
point of view, unconsciously embodied in metaphor and 
trick of speech, for the determination of reality and of 
fact; and for the literary artist each contains, no less than 
the sailor’s point of view, the potentiality of romance. 
But the profession is not yet the individual; and what is 
true of the class is truer still, and perhaps only then true, 
of the individual himself, and only so far as he is a con- 
scious and genuine individual. Every thinking man’s im- 
pression of the world is an artistic intuition. As a think- 


172 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ing man he is not a mere recipient of impressions, but the 
artist and architect of a universe; or, once more, a creator 
of life. 

And yet his impression of the world is knowledge of the 
world. How this may be, our imagination may not easily 
grasp. But we may appreciate the cognitive quality of our 
impressions, and at the same time the aesthetic quality of our 
cognitions, if from the world of “things”, seemingly given 
once for all, we return to the more sociable and negotiable 
world of persons; where indeed the unity of the spirit, the 
identity of the moral, the aesthetic, and the logical, is 
most clearly in evidence. Suppose that some one asks me 
about Smith—say that he is considering Smith as a candi- 
date for an important appointment. Since Smith’s family 
and mine have always been neighbors I know all about 
Smith. But it will not answer his question to give him, 
however completely and accurately, a coldly impersonal 
record of the facts. Though the facts be important, such 
a restricted account may even arouse suspicion. And he 
is likely to interrupt me with something like, Yes, but 
what is your impression of Smith? 

What he wants is not scientific fact but aesthetic ap- 
preciation—a task of another dimension. The facts are 
easy to convey; but my impression? If I have any 
intimate insight into the character of Smith my impression 
is bound to be complex and perhaps problematic. It will 
not suffice to use the customary slang and say, ‘“‘Oh! first- 
class” or “no good”. And if I succeed in really conveying 
my impression it will mean that I have the art of a poet. 
But it will be no less a matter of art even to give that 
impression form to myself; that is, to form the impression. 
Yet my questioner in seeking my impression is not merely 


THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 173 


curious about the quality of my taste; he is paying a com- 
pliment to my intelligence, to my capacity for knowledge. 
The facts about Smith he will take from any reasonably 
careful person, but for impressions he wishes to be assured 
of a discriminating insight. And that cognitive insight 
he expects to find in the expression of my taste. 


§ 53 


So much for the matter of impressions. And now we 
may perhaps see why for Croce history is a branch of art. 
For history in any worthy sense is not a chronicle of events 
but an insight into the life of persons. Even if we adopt 
the (to me repugnant) theory that history deals with 
movements and tendencies we have still to answer the 
question—if history is to bear any relation to human life 
—what was the movement or the tendency for those who 
lived within it? What was the twelfth century for those 
who lived in the twelfth century? What was Locke’s 
essay for those living in the year 1690, or in 1700? Surely 
not a “dear old book’’, as it was for William James. But 
this insight is just the limit, in the mathematical sense, of 
all historical inquiry; even the limit defined, as by Royce, 
as the point just beyond any possible concrete attainment 
—as the number 2 lies ever beyond the sum of 1, 4%, %, 
etc. And scientific historical inquiry, however important 
as an accessory, will never quite yield it. A man may 
spend a lifetime reading the twelfth century, and the result 
may be only a card catalogue. Insight into the twelfth 
century—a grasp of that impression of the twelfth century 
of which the literature and events of the twelfth century 
are the corresponding expression—is reserved for imagina- 
tion and for art. Historical criticism, literary criticism, 


174 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


art criticism, and moral criticism are in the last analysis 
identical activities. 

A very important illustration of the Crocean logic of his- 
tory is suggested by Albert Schweitzer’s genial and fascinat- 
ing “Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung”’, or history of 
the investigation of the life of Jesus. It would be not too 
much to say that for the part of the world called Christen- 
dom the life of Jesus is history’s greatest problem. No 
field of historical inquiry has been overridden by a greater 
number of theories or by a stranger variety; and none has 
raised questions more poignantly personal. The world has 
never seen, says Schweitzer, such a bitter, intense, and self- 
denying struggle for truth as we find in this field during the 
century or more past. 

What is the problem? ‘The records of the life of Jesus 
are full of yawning gaps. How are they to be filled? At 
the worst, says Schweitzer,” by phrases; at the best by his- 
torical imagination (historische Phantasie). The sources 
give us, so to speak, the phenomena; but we do not under- 
stand them historically—they are not history—until we 
comprehend them as consistent and intelligible and grasp 
them as expressions of the life of a specific individual per- 
son. And this can be doné, according to Schweitzer, only 
by an historical experiment; by which he means an experi- 
ment in imagination of the same kind as that which 
I have proposed in the last chapter as Royce’s “thought- 
experiment”’. In other words, if we are to comprehend the 
facts of the life of Jesus in their true sequence and inner 
consistency, and if we are to distinguish fact from fiction, 
it will be through imaginative insight into the mind of 
Jesus. We must grasp the life of Jesus from the stand- 


2See his introductory chapter, entitled ‘Das Problem”, zweite Auflage, 
Tiibingen, 1913. 


THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE 175 


point of his own self-consciousness, feeling that life as he 
felt it, seeing the world as he saw it. Now to the orthodox 
Christian this is almost suggestive of blasphemy; to the 
student of history I fear it may be equally suggestive of 
irony. Yet in all soberness it seems to me to state the his- 
torian’s problem, a problem which is possibly never finally 
to be solved, yet to be solved more or less as other problems 
of life are solved. Could we once see Jesus as he saw 
himself, then all of the critical questions, the vexing ques- 
tions of chronology, of sources, of genuine documents and 
spurious, of original accounts and interpolations—for all of 
these questions we should soon find the answer; and the 
key to the answer would be the happy insight. 

And thus the life of Jesus is an artistic and aesthetic 
problem—a problem of the same order as the problem of 
painting a portrait of Jesus. The portrait could never by 
any scientific method be constructed from the ‘‘data’”’, yet 
the successful portrait would account finally for all of the 
data. 

So much, then, for the beauty of knowledge. I will close 
the chapter by suggesting a question. It will not be 
doubted that history is knowledge. Yet history is at once 
an exercise of intelligence, of taste, and of moral judgment 
—in a word, of imagination. But it seems that what is 
thus true of knowledge directed upon a world of persons 
is true also in some degree when knowledge is dealing with 
impersonal facts about “things”. There too we have 
imagination. And what is more, it seems that, even in this 
impersonal region, whenever knowledge becomes eager and 
passionate, the assertion of an experience rather than of the 
fulfilment of a criterion, of realities rather than of 
“phenomena”, it tends to personify its things. My belief 


176 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


is that Kant’s “things in themselves” which scientific 
method could never know, were metaphorical persons. 
This suggests the deeply interesting question whether, if 
knowledge is to be an experience, and not the formal ful- 
filment of a logical requirement, we human beings can pos- 
sibly have the experience of knowing anything but persons; 
or, putting it otherwise, whether a world of impersonal fact, 
or of inanimate things—an ‘“‘unthinking substratum’, as 
Berkeley calls it—must not always be a world which is thus 
far not known. A successful development of this sugges- 
tion would be the consummation of ‘‘the unity of the spirit”. 


CHAPTER XII 
JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 


§ 43. Judgment vs. criticism. § 44. Objectivity and rationality. 
§45. The illusion of deliberate wickedness. § 46. “Tout com- 
prendre’ and “tout pardonner’. §47. The moral question and 
the practical. 


oe OU do not receive an education that you may 
learn to judge, but that you may learn to under- 
stand.” These words of the peasant-mother 
to her son (quoted above) might stand as the text for the 
present chapter. The motive of an enlightened morality 
is not ‘to award praise or blame” but to understand. 
Moral intelligence is not judgment but criticism. 

Yet to understand is certainly in some fashion to dis- 
criminate, and thus to distinguish the real from the merely 
apparent, the true from the false. If morality is just any- 
thing you please—anything you choose to call ‘“‘life’-—the 
word is without meaning and we understand nothing. 
Morality cannot be “purely subjective”. There must be 
an objectively real quality in any genuine morality even 
though we refuse to abide by any objective “criterion’’. 
Now in the first chapter my thesis was stated simply, by 
saying that morality is knowing what you are doing; it is 
not then a question of what you do. The present chapter 
is to show how the reality of the knowing constitutes the 
objective moral quality; how action or expression is justified 


by knowledge. 
177 


178 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
§ 43 


Morality, I say, is criticism. Let us look, then, at the 
logic of literary criticism. Suppose that you have a book 
to review. ‘The authoritative method of criticism is to com- 
pare the thesis of the book with what is recognized by the 
best authorities and to measure its style by the recognized 
standards of style. But this method, while useful for dis- 
posing of the common run of inconsiderable literature, is 
not criticism. It is no true judgment of the book. For 
a true judgment it matters not at all whether the message 
of the book is warranted by the authorities. As for such 
“authorities”, the history of any subject is a succession of 
conflicting authorities. The important question is, Is the 
author familiar with the authorities? This we mean when 
we ask, Does he know his subject? Or perhaps not even 
this. He may be one of those rare cases of the untaught 
genius who knows his subject without knowing any of the 
authorities; who by native insight has anticipated the au- 
thorities. And so the question is resolved into this: is he 
prepared to meet the authorities? Does the development of 
his position indicate that he is alive to the questions to 
which such a position is open and that he is is prepared to 
meet them? Or is he writing blindly and naively, repeat- 
ing possibly what many have said before him, unconscious 
of pitfalls that await him? If he does know, he is writing 
intelligently; and his book, whatever its thesis, is worthy 
of respect. By virtue of his knowing his treatment of his 
subject is objective. 

And as for his style—I recall the words of an architect 
who once said to me, ‘You may break all the rules of 
architecture if you have mastered them.” Likewise may 
you break all the rules of manners if you have mastered 


PUserrLOATT ON (BY EN OWLEDGE 179 


them. But here again it is not a question of mastering 
the “rules” but of being a master of style—there are seem- 
ingly untaught masters of style. And this question is best 
answered by asking how finely and justly, and with what 
deliberateness of expression, the style communicates the 
meaning. Does he know how to make words respond to 
and express his thought? If so he is a master of style no 
matter how strange his style. 

Such I take to be the logic of literary criticism. Such 
is likewise the logic of art criticism as understood by Croce. 
According to Croce art is expression. It matters not what 
you choose to express. There are no laws determining for 
the artist what is beautiful or ugly. Yet not everything is 
art that calls itself art. Croce speaks of “absolute art”’; 
that is, of art as having an objective quality. Art is the 
expression of an impression. Of any work of art we may 
therefore ask how perfectly the impression is expressed or 
conveyed. But this is only to ask how far the words, the 
statue, the song, or what not, contain a meaning. Is there 
“speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with’? 
So far as there is meaning there is beauty and art—absolute 
and objective art whatever the meaning. 

And such precisely, as I conceive it, is the logic of moral 
criticism. To select a possibly crucial example from the 
standpoint of the orthodox view, suppose that a man and 
woman are planning to live together without the form of 
marriage, or to form some sort of conventionally illicit 
union. Where the parties are free to marry there might 
seem to be no important question, and the increasing ease 
of divorce would seem to dispose of most of the other cases. 
Yet one may conceive of cases where divorce might be un- 
desirable and of others where parties free to marry might 


180 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


nevertheless wish to escape the complications imposed by 
legal and social convention. In any case we are here fac- 
ing the question whether one’s life is one’s own or the prop- 
erty of the social order; whether marriage (so to speak) 
is a personal relation or a public institution. 

Authoritarian judgment would of course condemn any 
illicit union as simply forbidden by the ordinances of so- 
ciety. Such judgment, as I have pointed out in Chapters 
V and VI, would be the judgment not of morality but of 
utility. Such criticism would not be moral criticism. On 
the other hand it would be as little in accord with the logic 
of moral criticism for the parties in question to toss their 
heads and say that they will do what they please; and that 
what they please is nobody’s business. This animal ges- 
ture suggests the morality of the slums. Other persons 
may at least raise the issue of whose business it is by ask- 
ing questions. The questions may well be impertinent 
questions, but they are not demonstrated to be such by a 
refusal to answer them. The only moral way of meeting 
a question is either to give it an intelligible answer or to 
show that it is the question of a fool. And though—on 
grounds mainly utilitarian—you may reasonably refuse to 
answer anybody’s and everybody’s question, the important 
consideration remains—and this is the moral consideration 
——could you give an answer to the question if you wished to 
do so? 

The moral question will then be something like this: the 
parties in question propose, quite properly, to do as they 
please, but do they know clearly what they please to doP 
Have they considered the matter “prayerfully”’, in all of its 
bearings? Have they, to begin with, faced the external 
consequences; the economic consequences, if they are not 


MUGCLLELCATION «BV rANOWLEDGE £81 


pecuniarily independent; then the social ostracism and 
relative isolation, with the possible limitation of their ac- 
quaintance to the relatively undesirable; the probable rup- 
ture of old ties—have they considered for each case what 
answer they will have to give? Again the scorn of the 
self-righteous and the abuse of the vulgar? Have they not 
merely faced these things as facts, but realized them in 
imagination as experience? And are they then prepared to 
meet the consequences cheerfully and uprightly without 
whimpering about wounded feelings? Have they also 
faced the more intimately personal consequences? What 
these may be, cannot of course be predicted; or just as 
little as we may predict the outcome of an authorized mar- 
riage. But the unrecognized union is on its personal side 
beset with peculiar difficulties—forcibly set forth by Tolstoi 
in his “Anna Karenina’’—and here even oftener than in 
marriage what has begun with ideal devotion has ended in 
personal aversion and mortification. They are undertak- 
ing something difficult and perilous—have they faced the 
nature of their undertaking? 

So far as for such questions they have found satisfactory 
answers I say that they have answered the moral question. 
The questions are not essentially different from those in- 
volved in any regular marriage. Only here it seems that. 
we are ready to take the will for the deed, the form for the 
reality. In either case, however, the essentially moral ques- 
tion is the question of the thoughtfulness (if you please, 
the conscientiousness) embodied in the act. 

Meanwhile the act is transformed by consciousness of 
the act (if indeed you may call anything an act apart from 
consciousness of the act). Here as everywhere in life con- 
sciousness makes a difference. Or self-consciousness, if 


182 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


you prefer—to me they are the same. Now when I say 
that morality is not a question of what you do, but wholly 
a question of knowing what you do, I expect to be greeted 
by the unimaginative with a scornful scepticism, by the 
pragmatic with the statement that the knowing must at 
least make a difference in what you do. And by both 1 
may be asked to explain—possibly “‘to figure out’—just 
how knowing what you do will transform what you do. 
Such a test I must reject as irrelevant. It presupposes all 
the logic of authoritarian morality: namely, that moral 
action is determinate and predictable, and that the prin- 
ciples of action, if not also the particulars demanded by the 
principles, are laid down once for all without reference to 
individual motive and significance. It presupposes also 
that to become conscious of one’s action is a fact of the same 
order as that of attaching, say, a governor to a steam- 
engine, the effect of which upon the behavior of the engine 
can of course be calculated. Knowing, I say, is of the 
nature of art. That knowing will make a difference in the 
doing stands as a matter of course. What you will say 
next will ever depend upon your realization of the meaning 
of what you are saying now. But what in fact you will 
say, though possibly to be anticipated more or less in sym- 
pathetic imagination, is beyond the possibility of logical 
or scientific prediction. All that we can predict is that 
those who understand will see the moral significance. 
Compare, however, the man and woman of our illustra- 
tion, assumed now to have formed the illicit union, with 
any man and woman—of the slums or of the so-called fast 
set of fashionable society—who have been drawn together 
simply by the present excitement of a good time. The 
difference comprehends most of the difference between the 


RUstirloATLON eB YS KNOWLEDGE «183 


man and the beast. We may expect a difference in be- 
havior; in the one case an observation of the decencies and 
delicacies appropriate to relations intimately personal which 
we may not find in the other. And a probable difference 
in the outcome: those who know what they are doing are 
thus far fortified against disloyalty. But these are out- 
lying considerations. The morally important difference is 
the immediate difference of quality, expressed in the dis- 
tinction of spiritual and animal. Those who in mutual 
intelligence know what they do have precisely thereby 
formed a “‘spiritual’” union; a bond never to be created, ex- 
cept magically, by the ceremony of marriage, of which this 
ceremony can never be more than an outward and visible 
sign. 

And in this fact of intelligence they have become re- 
sponsible, in the strictly etymological and at the same time 
the most significantly ethical use of that term. To be 
responsible is to be capable of giving an intelligent answer 
to an intelligent question: it does not presuppose, rather it 
distinctly repudiates the presupposition of an expected 
answer. ‘What do you mean by doing this?” The child 
who struggles to reply to your impatient question, protest- 
ing that he had perfectly good intentions which you would 
appreciate if only you could understand, has in him the ele- 
ment of moral responsibility however strange his intentions 
may seem to you. He is socially and morally accessible; 
his attitude is reasonable. The child who meets you with 
sullen defiance, with stolid indifference, or with dumb sub- 
mission, protesting nothing because he has no protest to 
make, is thus far morally impossible. His attitude is char- 
acteristic of those whom among adults we call ‘“morons’’. 

Such, then, is the logic common to criticism, literary, 


184 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


aesthetic, ethical. It may help to confirm and possibly 
further to clarify the conception if I add that such also is 
the logic of historical criticism. And history, as I have 
said above, is criticism—and moral criticism. But the 
moral attitude of historians is commonly very unsatisfactory 
to orthodox moralists. For while interested at every point 
in the moral quality of policies and persons, historians are 
curiously little interested in correcting the course of history 
or in classifying its important persons as good and bad. 
The historian takes any of the interesting personages— 
such as Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Plato, Martin 
Luther, Macchiavelli, Bismarck, Edmund Burke, or Ben- 
jamin Franklin—more or less as he finds them; and then 
he asks what measure of genius, of greatness of thought 
or conception, may be found to be expressed in their careers. 

The effect of the question itself will be doubtless to 
transform them—to create, at the same time to bring out, a 
new region of fact with regard to the careers. The question 
will still be the question of moral justification. Was there 
a greatness of political wisdom embodied in the policy of 
Napoleon, or was he only a vulgar bandit and politician 
favored by extraordinary circumstances? Was Moham- 
med, as Carlyle would have him, a case of where “the 
inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding” or, 
as suggested by Eduard Meyer, a prophet of the same order 
and on the same level with the Mormon prophet, Joseph 
Smith? Otherwise expressed, was the gospel of Mohammed 
the expression of a spiritual experience or was it simply 
words? Such a question, it would seem, is asking about 
an objective reality, however difficult the answer. Such is 
the question of historical criticism and such also is the ques- 
tion of moral criticism. 


WEUSil bho oA LO NEE Yak N OW LE DG Bt loo 


And such, then, is the meaning of justification by knowl- 
edge. So far as any form of expression, 7. e., of action or 
behavior, is intensively conscious—so far as it is thoughtful, 
reflective, self-conscious, so far indeed as it is in any proper 
sense experience—it is thus far morally significant and 
morally justified whatever its factual character. One 
might even say, with Pater, so far as it is a “‘passion”’, if 
we add his significant warning, ‘Only be sure that it is a 
passion—that it does yield you the fruit of a quickened 
and multiplied consciousness.’ On the other hand the 
nature and course of the action will then be transformed 
by the consciousness of the action. Take any action you 
please. Then put consciousness into the action. You 
cannot say how the action will be transformed; and no law 
can prescribe how it ought to be transformed. But this 
you can say: those who understand will mark the presence 
of moral quality and for them it will have moral dignity. 


§ 44 


I will now point out briefly that this conception of moral- 
ity is not so very foreign to the categories of common sense, 
however it may be opposed to orthodox doctrine. And first 
the category of objectivity. An experience, I have just said, 
is objective—and it is objectively an experience—so far as 
it is critical; and this means that it is cognizant—objectively 
cognizant—of other experiences. Now when the term ‘‘ob- 
jective” is used by philosophers and men of science it is 
likely to suggest a set of rules formulated on behalf of 
logic or of scientific method. But these rules are nothing 
but more or less ineffectual attempts to define the ex- 
perience of objectivity; an experience suggested more 
directly when the literary critic speaks of objective criticism. 


186 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


And this experience of objectivity is only the experience that 
we have when we think our thoughts in the light of (not 
in conformity with) the thoughts of other persons. It does 
not mean that we follow a rule or that we substitute the 
thoughts or plans of other persons for our own. Objective 
thinking is, so to speak, fresh-air thinking or broad- 
daylight thinking while subjective thinking is chamber- 
thinking fearing to expose itself even to itself. Objective 
decisions are decisions reached after criticism. And as 
thus objective and responsible I may also point out that 
morality is in the true sense “‘social”—as against the cus- 
tomary sense of sacrifice for the common good. 

Next the category of rationality. Thoughtful action is 
per se rational action. Yet not to be measured by any “‘rule 
of reason”. Here again the rule is but an ineffectual at- 
tempt to transcribe an experience. This is shown in a very 
interesting way when we inquire into the motive of that most 
resolute of all attempts to reduce morality to a rule of reason 
which is embodied in Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical im- 
perative”; which commands us to “act as if the maxim from 
which you act were to become through your will a universal 
law of nature”. What did Kant have in mind here as the 
aspect most characteristic of the action of a moral or ra- 
tional being—uniformity of action or consciousness of 
uniformity? The answer he has already given by saying: 
“Everything in nature acts in conformity with law. Only 
a rational being has the faculty of acting in conformity 
with the idea of law.” * Note carefully the implications of 
this, and you will see that the one certain mark of a ra- 
tional being is that he knows what he is doing; and whether 


1 From Section II of The Metaphysic of Morality. The translation is from 
Watson’s Selections from Kant, p. 235. 


JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 187 


such a being will then feel bound to emulate the uniformity 
of nature is another question. 

In the end it seems that what Kant had before him was 
the simple eighteenth-century distinction to the effect that 
men have reason while brutes (and a fortiori inanimate na- 
ture) have it not. This man-brute distinction marks the 
experience of rationality; it is par excellence the ex- 
periential meaning of morality. All of moral philosophy 
is an attempt to say how man differs from the brute. 
Kant’s categorical imperative was an attempt to reduce the 
distinction to a kind of mathematical definition. For my- 
self I prefer simply to point to the experience which Kant 
tried to define, the experience, namely, of knowing what 
you are doing. But this, I should say, is just what any 
man whose mind is undebauched by logic means by acting 
rationally. When we say of a man emerging from delirium 
that “he talked rationally” we do not mean that he talked 
in syllogisms. We mean simply that he knew where he 
was. ‘The darkness of delirium had been succeeded by 
“the light of reason”, And the concrete designation for an 
irrational impulse is invariably that it is “blind”’. 

There remains, however, an implication which I would 
probably best not pretend to reconcile with the usual cate- 
gories either of common sense or of orthodox ethics. And 
the implication is vital. Moral action, I say, is thoughtful 
action, and this is sufficient. Moral action, in other words, 
is deliberate action. Now in the common view moral action 
must indeed be deliberate. But this common view is likely 
then to insist upon the reality of deliberately immoral ac- 
tion. And this of course I deny. I do not say, be it noted, 
that deliberate action is certain to end in being right—thus 


188 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


implying a miraculously pre-established harmony between 
deliberate choice and an orthodox standard. I say rather 
that it is “right” in being deliberate. The distinction of 
deliberate wrong-doing is then a distinction introduced by 
the authoritarian standard. 

The reader will perceive that we have again before us 
one of the dramatis personae of an earlier chapter in the 
person of “‘the clever rogue”. One of the most interesting 
of his kind is the great American humbug; who, however, 
is not exclusively American. There are two beautiful 
studies of the humbug by Alphonse Daudet, one in a lighter 
tone in the trilogy of “Tartarin”, the other in a graver, 
almost vindictive, tone in ‘Numa Roumestan”. We find 
him everywhere in life—and never quite certainly not in 
ourselves; in the college professor who, having lost his zeal 
for study, will now authenticate his profession by oracular 
observation and edifying sentiment; in the politician who, 
his pockets lined with tainted money, lays his hand upon 
his heart and talks about his service to his country. The 
divergence between profession and fact seems so obvious 
that we assume the deception to be deliberate. Carlyle 
betrays this assumption when he seeks to vindicate the 
character of Mohammed by denying that he was ‘“‘a poor 
conscious ambitious schemer’”. Yet we reveal our per- 
plexity by putting the assumption in the form of a ques- 
tion: how is such deliberate mendacity and hypocrisy 
possible? How can the fellow expect any one to believe 
him? 

Why should we, however, assume deliberate mendacity? 
Why not adopt the more probable assumption (nicely 
worked out by Daudet in “Numa Roumestan’’) that the 
fellow deceives himself? Not that he may not suffer from 


Us Lee A TO Neb ak NO W LEDC Ee 189 


occasional terrible moments of self-revelation. But when 
he gets out before the audience, and hears the intoxicating 
sound of his own voice and the plaudits of the crowd, why 
should he not believe that after all he must be very much 
what he pretends to be? Does this mean, however, that he 
is to be reckoned among the rather innocent citizens of a 
moral world? By no means, I reply; the citizens of the 
moral world are not among the “innocent”. The fact 
that he deceives himself is just the most decisive ground 
for banishing him. ‘The habit of deceiving other persons 
is sufficiently doubtful as a mark of intelligence, but he 
who deceives himself must be set down as hopeless. Alas, 
these conscious hypocrites, these clever rogues, these shrewd 
diplomats, they have so little in them! Were they delib- 
erate hypocrites, it would mean that they had sounded 
depths of wisdom by you or me unsuspected. And then 
for us they would be adding to the significance of human 
life. 

And thus I continue to reject the distinction of the good 
man and the bad, as a distinction morally irrelevant; and 
the discrimination that I have in mind is between the 
presence of moral significance and the absence of it; which 
seems to me to mark the critical attitude. For my own 
part, I seem to find ever less use for such terms as 
“wicked”, “sinful”, “nefarious”, and the like. They 
seem to me to correspond to nothing real. And I tend 
rather to think of those who are morally inadmissible as 
“coarse’’, “‘brutal’’, or ‘‘insensitive’’. Nor can J very easily 
digest the simple distinction suggested by ‘“‘the criminal 
classes”. I doubt very much whether the criminal classes | 
have that character for themselves; and I suspect that 
many of them are only persons born belatedly, out of due 


190 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


time, persons who might have won a title of nobility in 
the free-booting ages of Elizabeth or of Anne, for whom 
however the present age is too civilized and sophisticated. 
And as for Milton’s Satan with his “Evil, be thou my 
good”, he is only the reductio ad absurdum of orthodox 
morality. I believe I am not the first to note that Milton 
has here invested Satan with a sublime moral dignity. 


§ 46 


The motive of morality, I have said, is not to judge but 
to understand. Now I dare say that the attentive reader 
has been already reminded by this of “tout comprendre est 
tout pardonner’’; often translated to mean that to under- 
stand is to forgive. And this French saying is commonly 
accounted to be the last word in sentimentalism. For 
what it seems to mean is that morally there is in the end 
no real difference between men. We are all well-meaning 
men, and the only problem of the moral life is to under- 
stand one another. Am I to confess, then, that sentimen- 
talism is the final meaning of the morality of intelligence? 

Now I am not certain that “tout comprendre est tout 
pardonner” may not be a fair expression of my meaning— 
although personally I do not care to consider the moral 
problem under the aspect of forgiveness. For aught I 
know there may be behind the action of any man and of 
every man a depth of reflection beyond my grasp. And 
I should say that a truly critical imagination will not 
easily be satisfied to abandon the search for meaning and 
the hope of discovering a meaning. Meanwhile, how- 
ever, this is not to say that every man has for me an 
achieved moral quality; and I am not so much of a sen- 


JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 191 


timentalist as to assume the moral quality without some 
verifying experience. That which is already compre- 
hended has its moral significance assured. But of any 
form of behavior raising the issue of criticism, it still re- 
mains to ask whether it is comprehensible; and behavior 
is not made comprehensible by showing that it is merely to 
be expected. 

The point is so interesting—and so full of dramatic 
significance when it comes into the more intimate personal 
life—that I must regret my inability to offer more than a 
seemingly trivial and prosaic illustration. Many years 
ago I went into a Chicago department-store for a pair of 
shoes. The salesman, a man between twenty-five and 
thirty, whom I marked at once as a blundering, “feckless” 
sort of fellow, and rather shabby for so pretentious an 
establishment (he was probably an extra man), showed 
me four pairs, all, he explained, of the same price. I 
selected one pair as being clearly better than the others, 
besides being of the shape I wanted. The salesman 
picked up another pair and began volubly to assure me 
that of the shoes he had shown me these were in every 
respect the best. I told him that I would none the less 
stand by my choice. Then in great confusion he explained 
that he had made a mistake; those that I preferred were 
considerably higher in price. And he added, rather 
sullenly, that if I insisted, he must sell them to me at the 
price named—and himself make up the difference. When 
I explained that I did not wish to save money at his ex- 
pense, he seemed pathetically relieved—and the transaction 
was closed. 

But the point of my tale is this. As I was leaving the 


192 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


place the salesman said to me in a confidential tone, half 
in bravado, half beseechingly, ““You see why I didn’t talk 
"em up to you, don’t you?” 

Did I see? That question, very amusing at the time, has 
stuck in my imagination for twenty-five years, and has 
come to embody for me one of the deepest questions of 
moral philosophy. Of course I saw that he had lied to 
me. But I also seemed to see more. I seemed to see in 
him one of those pathetic, well-meaning incompetents who 
will never be good for much and will never know why. 
And I guessed that after the fashion of his improvident 
kind he had probably taken to him a wife and begotten 
a child or two for whom it was a desperate task to provide. 
The discovery that by his blunder he had made a hole in 
his week’s wages was more than he could bear. And so, 
naturally and inevitably, he lied. 

Was this a case of “tout comprendre est tout pardonner’’? 
Hardly, I should say. I could not resent the lie. But 
absence of resentment is not, except for authoritarian 
morality, moral justification. To note that an action 
takes place “naturally and inevitably”, as I have just put 
it, is by no means to comprehend the action. To compre- 
hend an action is nothing less than to appreciate the 
meaning of the action from the agent’s point of view. 
This is to assume that there is such a point of view; in 
other words, that the action has moral quality. 

Suppose, then, that reading my thoughts, he had re- 
plied with something like this: “I know what you are 
thinking; and what you suppose is mostly true. I am 
indeed one of the incompetents. But don’t suppose that 
I lied to you unwittingly; because I couldn’t help it; be- 
cause I had no sense of the offensiveness of a lie. I did 


JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 193 


know, and it was in spite of knowing—or, if you please, in 
the light of knowing—that I lied deliberately. I resent as 
an imposition a rule that compels an employee to make 
good out of his own pocket, for the supposed honor of 
the establishment, a blunder that might easily and harm- 
lessly be rectified; and I feel that I am justified in pro- 
tecting myself against the customer who will use this for 
his own advantage. In your case I seem to have made a 
mistake; but as a matter of general policy I say that the 
lie was justifiable.” 

To put this speech into the mouth of the person I have 
described may seem far from realistic. But if so it will 
only bring out the point of the illustration, namely, the 
realistic character of the moral distinction and the difference 
between a true moral judgment and a mere outburst of 
sentiment. The moral question is the very nice question 
of interpretation: how much consciousness of meaning may 
I believe to lie in or behind this act? How far is it self- 
conscious, how far merely automatic—how much “specu- 
lation in those eyes”? And had I encountered such a 
rationalized justification as I have endeavored to suggest, 
then, even while loathing a liar on general principles, I 
must certainly have abandoned with shame the superior 
attitude I was tempted to assume, and I must then have 
recognized in the man before me a person of moral 
dignity. I need not have assented to the necessity of 
lying. I might have thought, vainly perhaps, that I my- 
self could have found a better way out. But this will only 
help us to see how remote are the casuistic questions— 
such as, Is a lie ever justifiablePp—from the vital issues 
of morality. 

In justification of my general thesis I will venture to 


194 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


offer one more illustration. Some time ago I chanced upon 
an autobiographical work by a Jewish writer, an Ameri- 
can of foreign birth. The book was a very personal 
document, in which an interesting experience and an in- 
teresting point of view were presented with genius and 
literary skill. At one point the writer was at pains to ex- 
plain to his reader that he could find none of the supposedly 
Jewish traits in himself. Evidently it was his purpose to 
prove that there is no difference between a Jew and a 
gentile. Personally I do not understand why a Jew, 
representing a people which has contributed so much to 
the culture of the race, should wish to deny that there is 
any distinctive quality in a Jew. It happens, however, 
that other gentile readers have agreed with me in thinking 
that the book in question exhibited rather markedly some 
of the more unpleasant traits commonly attributed by 
gentiles to Jews. 

And in particular the following. The writer referred 
more than once to his wife and to his married life in terms 
that should win respect, yet with a certain defensive, not 
to say truculent, eloquence which made one wonder at the 
necessity. At the same time he commented in terms most 
contemptuous upon the “commonplace” and ‘‘uninterest- 
ing” wives of men with whom he had been associated; men 
who, it seemed, had not only done him no ill but had been 
generally friendly to him, and whose chief fault seemed to 
be that they preferred the society of their wives to 
his own society. Now this lack, I will not say of 
chivalry, but of objective decency and fairness—this child- 
ish and ill-mannered disposition to write one’s own sensi- 
bilities large and the sensibilities of others small—is 
unfortunately just what the common gentile world— 


JUSTIFICATION BY KNOWLEDGE 195 


whether truly or falsely, matters not for our purpose—is 
most inclined to regard as the peculiar mark of the Jew. 
And whether truly or falsely, how could he fail to be alive 
to the nature of the prejudice and to provide for it? 
Either, it seems, he must then have deleted these offensive 
passages or he must have justified them by explaining his 
point of view. And I think he must then have gone on 
to make as persuasive as possible the beauty of the Jewish 
character. 

The difficulty with this writer, I guess, was precisely 
that he was unaware of these so-called Jewish traits. He 
did not know what his attitude would mean to his reader, 
nor just what it meant to himself. This was the root of 
the moral difficulty, and this constituted his offence and 
his offensiveness. After all, one can permit a man to say 
anything he pleases to one—or, apart from its practical 
aspect, to do anything he pleases—provided he makes 
clear the significance of what he is saying or doing. And 
in spite of all race prejudices, any racial trait tends to 
justify itself and to compel recognition when it expresses 
itself consciously and responsibly. The unconscious race- 
tendency is a trait merely brutal; the self-conscious expres- 
sion of tendency is a contribution to life. 


§ 47 


So much for the justification by knowledge. Now I 
fear very much that some obstinately practical reader will 
be certain at this point to ask me what we are going to 
do about it when the carefully meditated purposes of dif- 
ferent persons issue in conflicting lines of action—when, 
for example, one of a married pair is thoughtfully resolved 
upon divorce, the other no less thoughtfully resolved against 


196 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


it. To him I can only repeat what has been said before, 
namely, that it is not the purpose of moral philosophy to 
draft a schedule of what to do. Such a task is reserved 
for those—the law, or possibly the police—whose function 
it is to frame utilitarian schemes of social order; in which 
I am here not interested. 

Meanwhile I may remind him once more of the dif- 
ference between settling a question and answering it, be- 
tween the disposal of a problem and its solution. The 
only conceivable moral resolution of a conflict is that which 
issues in mutual understanding after conference and dis- 
cussion. The moral world knows nothing of judges, 
umpires, courts, and laws. If the parties should appeal to 
me I could give them only the rather easy advice to state 
their case, each to the other, with the utmost possible 
frankness. Putting it very vulgarly I might say, Begin 
by laying your cards on the table—if only you know what 
cards you are really holding. Any card-player will be 
reminded by this figure that consciousness makes an im- 
portant difference; after seeing your careless opponent’s 
hand at bridge it is very difficult to play as if you had 
not seen it—you do not now know what your own hand alone 
would have suggested. In like fashion your own case is 
likely to look very different after you have grasped the 
point of view of the other party; and the difference makes 
the two more negotiable, more capable of a resolution 
satisfying to both. 

But it may be that with the best will to negotiate there 
will remain elements of flat opposition of interest. This 
will mean only that, humanly speaking, the problem is 
morally insoluble. But if the problem is not morally 
soluble, in the sense of yielding complete mutual satisfac- 


MUSTIEILCATION BYVENOWLEDGE 197 


tion, there may still be found a compromise, involving 
reciprocal sacrifice, which it will pay both parties to accept. 
Let us not, however, mistake this mutual sacrifice for a 
moral solution. And if no practicable compromise is dis- 
coverable—well, if I were one of the parties I should then 
make the typical utilitarian calculation of profit and loss 
and ask myself how far it would pay me to yield the 
points now left in dispute, how far to fight for them. But 
when it comes to this we have left the moral world well in 
the distance. 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 


§ 48. The Epicurean attitude. §49. An Epicurean confession. 
§ 50. Epicurus and Pater. § 51. Enjoyment and imagination. 
§ 52. The enjoyment of friendship and the enjoyment of religion. 
§ 53. Serious enjoyment. 


N connection with the pragmatic attitude it was said 
that the significance of any temporal moment of life, 
or the meaning of any present desire, might be any- 

thing you please; ‘“‘the present” is a question of the present 
scope of imagination. The same indefinite possibility 
confronts us when we think to define the boundaries of 
human nature. Could we think of the human being 
simply as an organism with a definite habitat and a re- 
stricted span of life, we might then formulate a definite 
“science of ethics’, based upon human nature as a natural 
fact, undisturbed by suggestions metaphysical. But such 
a science of ethics would hardly merit the name of moral 
philosophy. The “moral nature” of man implies that he 
is not a mere organism but an organism which is self- 
conscious and critical, an organism with imagination. 
To human nature as thus conceived it seems difficult to 
assign any “natural” boundaries. 

In the previous chapters I have found it convenient to 
take human nature, generally speaking, as it “is”, But 
now it seems that to leave the story at this point is to omit 
all the deeper issues of moral philosophy; and to impose 


upon the critical life a termination artificially abrupt— 
198 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 199 


even though we foresee that further inquiry will be inquiry 
without end. Acordingly I shall go on, in these remain- 
ing chapters, to pursue as certainly as I can the more re- 
flective implications of the critical life. I shall begin in 
the present chapter by asking what is meant by the enjoy 
ment of life. 


§ 48 


The question relates to the possibility of maintaining 
in the form of a critical life what in general terms may be 
described as an Epicurean attitude. Now it happens that 
the Epicurean (using the term in its broadest sense) is 
the person who is supposed to make the critical life his 
special profession; by which I mean that he lays a special 
claim to sophistication, regarding himself perhaps as the 
finally sceptical and disillusioned. It is he who has laid 
bare the vanity of most of the satisfactions that men seek, 
the vanity of social or political or literary distinction, the 
vanity of wealth and no less the vanity of the satisfaction 
afforded by the crude gratification of sensual appetite. 
But above all it is he who has demonstrated the vanity 
of religious hopes or fears, the vanity of all considerations 
relating to the fact of death. Reading Epicurus or\ 
Lucretius, one feels that in their view the one thing neces- | 
sary for human salvation is indifference to death. The 
gods exist—perhaps; but whether they exist or not, we 
may be sure that the matter is no concern of ours. Human 
life must stand upon its own basis. Therefore let us 
cultivate our garden and not look beyond. 

What, then, has life to offer? Well, for the Epicurean 
not a great deal, but something worth while if we moderate 
our expectations. The enjoyment of friendship, for ex- 


200 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ample, if we are careful not to expect too much of our 
friends; and this calls for an attitude of amiability and 
cheerfulness, of urbanity and graciousness, and a kindly 
tolerance of human weaknesses. The art of life is to take 
men and things as we find them and to cultivate a taste 
for what they actually have to give us. To Epicurus and 
his friends it seemed that the chief fruits of the garden 
were the persons of one’s inner circle. The Epicurean of 
the modern sort attaches more importance to the enjoyment 
of beauty and he may even add to this the enjoyment of 
religion. Any aspect of life may conceivably appeal to his 
taste for enjoyment simply as an aspect of life; that is, 
as a variety of sensation or of feeling. But in all such 
he conceives that he is dealing only with immediate and 
tangible realities. The sensation or the feeling is a 
realized fact; the cognitive significance of a sensation or a 
feeling is a vain speculation. And whatever may be true or 
false in the realm of speculation, it cannot change the nature 
of what is perceived, or felt, as a matter of fact. 


§ 49 


Whether I am by nature and temperament an Epicurean, 
I hardly know—certainly I find the Epicurean urbanity 
a difficult achievement. But as a moral philosopher I 
should be willing to call myself an Epicurean if only I 
might be permitted to remain a critical Epicurean; and 
in any case it has been my purpose in the foregoing 
chapters to justify the Epicurean demand for the enjoy- 
ment of life as an element essential to morality. I will 
therefore venture to illustrate my Epicurean sympathies 
somewhat as follows. When I see a group of children 
playing happily together, or at least with fair success 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 201 


managing their own affairs, my instinctive feeling is, 
Leave them alone. It seems to me something of an im- 
pertinence to show them how they ought to manage their 
affairs and especially to show them how they ought to 
play their game. And if it be said that the game if 
properly supervised could be made an instrument of self- 
culture and of moral discipline, my reply would be that 
they are getting the best sort of discipline as it is if only 
they are alive and playing the game. It may be only too 
necessary presently to interrupt them for the purpose of 
“training” them, along lines not spontaneously suggested 
by their interests, to meet the demands of a sternly prac- 
tical world. But I do not feel called upon to add to the 
sternness of the world. I suspect indeed that sternness 
closes the mind instead of opening it." And I should 
really like to believe that education could be left to the 
play of native interests. I am compelled rather to believe 
that native interests might fail to assert themselves apart 
from the discipline of life. Even so I can see no reason 
why I should artificially intensify the discipline of life. 
As an Epicurean I should like to extend to men in 
general the kind of indulgence—deference, I prefer to 
call it—that I have in mind for the children. I wish to 
respect men’s enjoyments, to let them live and grow through 
living. I have no desire to “organize” them; and I refuse 
to be organized myself beyond what is plainly necessary 
for practical purposes. I might almost say, with Mr. 
Santayana, that I wish them only “simple happiness’. 


1 Bosanquet, the high-priest of absolutism, quotes from Mark Pattison “the 
force of individual character generated by the rule of Calvin at Geneva’; 
which means, I suspect, that dogmatism on the part of the master generates 
an equally dogmatic opposition on the part of the pupil. Calvinism is a system 
by which each exacts retribution from his children for the discipline inflicted 
by his parents. 


202 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


At any rate I will quote his words as saying so much better 
than any of my own very nearly what I mean: 


“JT find that I am sometimes blamed for not laboring more 
earnestly to bring down the ideal good of which I prate into the lives 
of other men. My critics suppose, apparently, that I mean by the 
ideal good some particular way of life or some type of character 
which is alone virtuous, and which ought to be propagated. Alas, 
their propagandas! How they have filled this world with hatred, 
darkness, and blood! How they are still the eternal obstacle, in 
every home and every heart, to a simple happiness! I have no wish 
to propagate any particular character, least of all my own; my con- 
ceit does not take that form. I wish individuals, and races, and 
nations to be themselves, and to multiply the forms of perfection and 
happiness, as nature prompts them. The only thing which I think 
might be propagated without injustice to the types thereby suppressed 
is harmony; enough harmony to prevent the interference of one type 
with another, and to allow the perfect development of each type.” ? 


And yet “a simple happiness”? Alas! I suspect that 
there is no simple happiness. The search for happiness 
inevitably develops complications and problems. And 
above all that supreme happiness which we hope to find in 
the intimacies of personal love and _ understanding. 
Happiness seems to be nowhere uncomplicated with “dis- 
cipline”. Yet even so I will let my neighbor find his 
discipline for himself. If he must go out of his way to 
find it and follow William James’s moralizing advice (so 
incongruous, by the way, with William James) to do 
something disagreeable every day just for the sake of dis- 
cipline—well, his demands upon life must be rather simple. 

But why men—but more especially women—should de- 
light in the imposition of discipline passes my compre- 
hension. When I see a young working-girl exulting in 


*From his essay, “On My Friendly Critics”, in Soliloquies in England, 
London, 1922. 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 203 


outrageously gaudy finery, her young man presenting the 
glass to fashion in the most grotesque of ready-made 
clothes, I feel in myself no disposition to rebuke their taste 
however little it be mine. What I mainly ask is that she 
should genuinely enjoy her fine feathers and that she 
should not be wearing them in imitation of fashionable 
ladies or in blinder obedience to department-store advertise- 
ments. And if her fine feathers bring her to shame—well, 
alas! When I read in “Adam Bede” of poor Hetty 
Sorrel driven by a terror of shame to causing the death of 
her illegitimate child I am apt to forget all that has been 
said about her vanity and selfishness, and I am impressed 
chiefly by the brutal cruelty of a social order which in- 
flicts such terrible penalties upon the irregular satisfac- 
tion of impulses so essentially innocent—so remote, at 
any rate, from anything malign or treacherous. 

And it is just this desire to punish others for their sins 
of sex, or any desire to regulate the sex-relations of others 
beyond the minimum of utility, that as an Epicurean I 
find most unintelligible. If Brown has married a woman 
with a past I feel no impulse to push Brown off the side- 
walk. If Brown and Mrs. Brown are happy together 
what more is there to be said? And who knows whether 
a shady experience may not turn out to be after the fact 
a superior opportunity for moral insight? All that I ask 
of them is a decent reticence. Or if I should hear that 
Smith and Mrs. Jones are suspected of being too intimate 
—well, as a gentleman it is not for me to inquire further ex- 
cept perhaps as I may be in a relation of personal respon- 
sibility to Jones or Mrs. Smith. As for the other two 
they have set themselves a task sufficiently hazardous— 
why should I wish them disaster? Sufficiently hazardous 


204 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


indeed is the task undertaken by any young man and 
woman who are seeking in marriage their happiness in one 
another. Surely the problem contains its own discipline, 
and failure is sufficiently humiliating; why should we care 
to add to the discipline imposed by the problem itself? 
And all of this is not because I would treat the sex-relation 
lightly; rather because to my own feeling even as an 
Epicurean the sex-relation is so deeply committing; al- 
though I will not say that it must be such for all persons 
under all circumstances. But in a relation so essentially 
private who but the principals can say where the real 
loyalties lie? And if there has been a betrayal what but 
the free conviction of the traitor himself can ever make good? 

And therefore as an Epicurean, but also if you like as 
a very serious moralist, I believe in “birth-control”; be- 
cause it would add freedom to the sex-relation, and moral 
freedom in the sense of separating the personal motive 
from the utilitarian. Authoritarian moralists are gen- 
erally united in the endeavor to suppress knowledge of 
methods of contraception and to hinder the attainment of 
any clearer knowledge. They claim that it would en- 
courage “immorality”. But I wonder how, except from 
a motive meanly curious, this could concern themselves. 
And I also wonder about the immorality. JI wonder if 
this is not a case of Macaulay’s Puritan who forbade bear- 
baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because 
it gave pleasure to the spectator. Moreover, I suspect 
that it is not immorality that they most fear: what they 
dread, for their children perhaps, is the significance of the 
issue which will be presented when sexual intercourse is 
definitely freed from the fear of consequences; and they 
fear to face a question purely moral. As for those who 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 205 


condemn birth-control as an interference with nature, their 
point of view I am obliged to put upon the level of that 
of the Mohammedan of the desert. 

I have dwelt upon the sex-problem because it seems to 
me to embody in acute form all of the problems of personal 
relations. And in my view all moral problems are in the 
end problems of personal relations. Accordingly, I do not 
deny that from the standpoint of social convenience and 
utility the rules of sex-morality may have an important 
justification, and therefore for the individual from the 
standpoint of worldly wisdom. And I would not be too 
disdainful of worldly wisdom. I even suspect that those 
may be right who tell us that happiness, in the sense of 
contentment, would be increased if marriages could be 
arranged in the good old-fashioned way by the consulta- 
tion of parents. But, precisely as an Epicurean, I cannot 
identify contentment with the enjoyment of life, or social 
respectability with personal chastity. 

Since all moral problems are problems of personal re- 
lations, I am disposed, here again as an Epicurean, to refer 
all morality to the principle of good manners. In sex- 
morality I feel that good manners would supply the 
determining principle. And above all in matters of reli- 
gion. A man’s wife, a man’s religion—these two most 
momentous choices of his life good manners forbid me to 
challenge or rudely to question. And on the other hand 
since I am not called upon to worship his wife why must 
he insist that I worship at the shrine of his religion? As 
an Epicurean it seems to me that religious differences 
ought of all things to present the least practical difficulty. 
That, I shall be told, is because I have no anxiety for 
other men’s souls, because religion is for me a matter of 


206 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


no significance. No, it is because I would respect their 
souls, and therefore their privacy, and because, precisely 
from this standpoint, I take their religion to be the matter 
of most significance. 

And I might go further to suggest the validity of good 
manners as a principle for broader fields, even for the 
field of international relations. If the moral ideas gov- 
erning these relations could be made to approximate those 
governing the relations of decent individuals; if national 
honor meant what honor means today to a man of intelli- 
gence and a gentleman, namely, a scrupulous sincerity and 
a scrupulous regard for obligations instead of a swagger- 
ing challenge to the issue of force; if peoples could re- 
frain from expressing contempt for one another’s stock 
and for one another’s religion and if such contempt could 
cease to be regarded as an evidence of patriotism; if 
jealousy and revenge could be thought as vain and un- 
worthy in a nation as in an individual—my impression 
is that the necessary economic adjustments would come 
rather easily and that we should presently have peace on 
earth and good will to men. 

Here, therefore, I differ from those who would dis- 
tinguish manners from morals, and the difference is one 
of principle. JI am not thinking of course of merely formal 
manners though I appreciate their great convenience. 
Nor do I feel it to be an important sign of good manners 
that a man knows the proper tone to use towards a servant. 
The motive of good manners, as I understand it, is the 
motive of respect for the personality of your fellow. Good 
manners properly conceived thus constitute the perfection 
of moral refinement. Those who would distinguish 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 207 


manners from morals will reply to me, Not good manners, 
but brotherly love. To me, however, brotherly love di- 
vorced from the motive of good manners is morally 
offensive. What doth it profit a man to heap him with 
benefits if you respect not his soul? And I think that it 
calls for a peculiarly Epicurean sort of imagination to 
sense the nature and varieties of soul. 


§ 50 


So much for the Epicurean confession. A few words 
now about Epicurean philosophers. As an Epicurean who 
is also a student of philosophy I refuse to interpret even 
the ancient and classical Epicureanism as meaning, Eat, 
drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. ‘This is per- 
haps what logically Epicurus ought to have meant, since 
it seems that for him and his school the chief fact of life 
was that life is short. But it seems also that the 
Epicureans, with a painful inconsistency perhaps, arrived 
at a very different conclu;:ion. We are but beasts that 
perish, therefore—shall we, therefore, enjoy the life of the 
beast? By no means. Therefore, rather, let us rescue 
from life what possibilities of sweetness and humanity it 
may have while yet there is time.* Epicurean morality, 
in other words, though confronted with the fact that man 
is a perishing animal, is based, like every other morality, 
upon the idea that man is an intelligent animal. Its 
question then is, What is the best life for an intelligent 
being? The Stoics replied to this question by an attempt 
to invest life with dignity and greatness. The Epicurean 


3 As expressions of the Epicurean motif, without the Epicurean pessimism, 
IT know of nothing better than Milton’s two graceful sonnets, “To Mr. Law- 
rence’ and “To Cyriack Skinner”. 


208 MORALOPHILOSOPEHY 


doubted the possibility. But he still hoped to make life 
genial and humane. And this was his conception of the 
enjoyment of life. | 

I would not, however, pin Epicureanism to the philos- 
ophy of Epicurus. Epicurus seems to have been a saintly 
person, but his philosophy of life was rather homely and 
matter-of-fact, prosaic and unimaginative. The classical 
Epicurean appears to have been neither an “‘epicure’’ nor 
an exquisite. At the same time the Epicurean conception 
of intelligence suggests a mechanical and calculating in- 
telligence such as the intelligence conceived by modern 
utilitarians; an intelligence about life, occupied in sorting 
and ordering the sensations forming the opaque material 
of life, but hardly an intelligence within life, within the 
sensations themselves. It is the attempt to make the sen- 
sations themselves intelligent that marks, I should say, 
the distinctive quality of the Epicureanism of today and 
constitutes its aesthetic motif. 

The philosophy of this motif, very properly called a 
philosophy, is contained in the writings of Walter Pater, 
whose version of “humanism” I have quoted in Chapter 
VIII. According to Pater the good life consists in the 
enjoyment of exquisite sensations. By moralists of the 
sober sort this philosophy of life is condemned with a_ 
vehemence almost vindictive as representing what Carlyle 
calls “the pig-philosophy” in only its most insidious and 
seductive form. On behalf of this criticism they can 
doubtless fairly quote chapter and verse. For my own 
part, however, I prefer to class Pater among the most 
suggestive of the greater moralists. Personally I do not 
wholly enjoy him. I seem to be in the presence of an 
obstructed mind—obstructed possibly by a too exquisite 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 209 


honesty; which, by the way, is the “lesson” of Pater’s 
essay on style. And young Marius the Epicurean strikes 
me as not a very stimulating companion. The picture of 
him somewhere in a room furnished solely with a vase 
containing one rare flower—for concentrated contemplation 
—tempts me to irreverence. Moreover, I am sometimes 
tempted to wonder for a moment how much meaning lies 
behind Pater’s words, and how far they may not be— 
words. And yet as I dwell upon them further I am im- 
pressed by their suggestiveness and they seem to work 
together into a significant if somewhat vaguely imagina- 
tive philosophy of life. 

This I look for in the later “Marius” rather than in 
“The Renaissance”. I have just noted that Epicurus’s 
conception of intelligence suggests an intelligence about 
sensations and not within them; as if life were a game of 
playing with pictures. I think that, in spite of certain 
very suggestive counteracting motives, much the same may 
be said for the Epicureanism (or Cyrenaicism) of Pater’s 
“Conclusion” to the volume on ‘The Renaissance”, To 
think only of giving “‘the highest quality to your moments 
as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’; “‘to 
burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this 
ecstasy” of the concentrated moment; in the presence of 
which ‘“‘we shall hardly have time to make theories [i. e., to 
exercise any imagination] about the things we see and 
touch’”—this especial kind of worship of “art for art’s 
sake”, of impression for impression’s sake, seems to leave 
little room for any quality of soul, of humanity, even of 
experience, within the impressions themselves. It is not 
properly sensations that Pater is dealing with here, but 
simply the counters or poker-chips which function as 


210 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


“entities” for Mr. Bertrand Russell and the mathematical 
logicians, only now agreably colored and _ illuminated. 
Thus far the aesthetic Epicureanism differs not essentially 
from the prosaic. 

In a footnote to this “‘Conclusion”’ in a later edition Pater 
says, “I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean 
with the thoughts suggested by it.” To the reader of 
“Marius” it seems rather that he has arrived at a new point 
of view; or at least at a view not quite foreseen in “The 
Renaissance”. And now we may see why Marius’s 
contemplation of the lone flower was a religious exercise, 
and what is meant by “art for art’s sake”. The point of 
the aesthetic philosophy is now that it will put meaning 
into that great region of life, represented by sense- 
preception, which for the dull mind is merely opaque fact. 
It will put intelligence within the sensation. An impres- 
sion is now no longer a fact, a thing, even a “flame”, but 
a vision—‘‘vision” is Pater’s favorite word. And the 
enjoyment of impressions is an exercise of imagination. 
And what is more, it seems that imagination may possibly 
reach the dimensions of religious insight and become an 
intuition of life eternal. Of one of the episodes in the 
spiritual development of Marius we read that ‘“He seemed 
to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative in- 
fluence of the philosophic reason—to the suggestions of a 
possible open country, commencing just where all actual 
experience leaves off, but which experience, one’s own ex- 
perience and not another’s, may some day occupy.” * 

And so it seems now that the key-word of Epicureanism 
is not “sensation”? but “imagination”; not sensation as an 
opaque fact but sensation as vision. And it is in this 

4 Marius the Epicurean, 1910, Vol. II, p. 36. 


THEIENTOY MENTOR CIEE nA! 


sense that I call myself an Epicurean; as one who looks 
for the realities of life in the exercise of imagination. 


§ 51 


This brings me to the point of the question that I have 
in mind. Upon what I have called its positive side, 
Epicureanism stands for the enjoyment of life. On its 
negative side, however, Epicureanism is marked—tradi- 
tionally, at least—by an insistence that life is a determ- 
inately limited natural fact. Sensation is thus a fact; 
value (i. e., pleasure—or pain) is in like manner a fact. 
In general the world is simply a fact; and to call it a 
fact means that it is simply this world, which may be 
fully defined and apprehended without any implication of 
a world beyond. And thus life is a fact. My question 
is, Can life be thus taken by any reflective mind? Can 
it thus be taken consciously and critically? Or—is it 
possible to enjoy life while taking life as a matter of fact? 

Epicureanism stands for the enjoyment of life. Every 
one, however, is committed to the enjoyment of life, some- 
where, at some time, in heaven if not on earth. For 
enjoyment is an indispensable condition of value. En- 
joyment stands for the realization of value. Vulgarly it is 
“cash-value”’; and a value which can never be a cash- 
value is no value whatever. But now, what is the mean- 
ing of such “realization” as a conscious or spiritual fact? 
Here, it seems to me, as nearly everywhere else, our ideas 
of things spiritual are encumbered by vulgar metaphors. 
We enjoy, and what we enjoy is blankly called “pleasure’’. 
Now, to enjoy is indeed to realize, to appropriate; and to 
appropriate most securely is, it seems then, to consume. 
On the other hand, what is enjoyed must be a realizable 


212 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


something; and thus, it seems, a quantum, something solid 
and substantial which is capable of appropriation. Hence 
the type of all enjoyment, the distinctively “solid” enjoy- 
ment, becomes the enjoyment of food; and the typical 
food-enjoyment the enjoyment of the animal. 

But suppose we reflect. By “enjoyment” we are mean- 
ing all the while a mental fact, namely, conscious ap- 
propriation. Observe with this in mind and you will note 
that the dog, for instance, does not enjoy his food, he simply 
bolts it. For a clearer realization of values we should 
turn to the child, say five years old, who, innocent of 
table-manners but with fine instinct, turns over his piece 
of bread and jam so that the jammy side may be in direct 
contact with the taste-organs on the tongue; and then 
probably licks off the jam before he consumes the bread. 
Or, better, to the connoisseur who, with due respect, slowly 
sips his glass of port and holds each sip for a moment 
on the tongue lest any of its fineness escape him. Here it 
should readily be seen that enjoyment is not a bare fact. 
The wine indeed is a fact. The enjoyment, however, is 
a process of discriminating intelligence—a spiritual even 
a dialectical process. And a process without a determin- 
ate end. A realization of value indeed yet never a com- 
pleted realization. Even the enjoyment of wine is 
sustained by an unappeased curiosity, a quest for nuances 
of taste foreshadowed but not quite grasped. When the 
wine ceases thus to stimulate it becomes insipid. 

And so of the enjoyment of life. It is doubtless a trifle 
suspicious when a more than middle-aged college professor 
undertakes to expose the mere pomp and vanity of a 
thoughtless world. And a trifle humorous—for what does 
he know about enjoyment? But this is to raise a question. 


THE ENJOYMBENT OF LIFE ZAG 


For my own part, although I cannot for long enjoy the 
society of youth, I find at times a keen pleasure in ob- 
serving the enjoyment of a group of healthy and happy 
children at play, or perhaps of a set of youths and 
maidens having the time of their life at a dance. And 
with the other elders I may sigh for the lost capacity thus 
to enjoy life. But not for long. If I were asked to change 
places with the youth I should hesitate. For there is 
something lacking to the completion of their enjoyment 
which, let us hope, has been won if sadly by the elders 
around the wall: namely, a thoughtful sense of life. It is 
delightful to contemplate the young ones. But the re- 
flection comes, What a pity that they cannot know—as 
we seem to know—what a good time they are having! 
Which means, whatever difficulties the thought may sug- 
gest, that only as they are conscious of enjoying are they 
really enjoying? And only thus far do we really sympa- 
thize with their enjoyment. After all it is the deeply 
earnest little ones who most stir us to sympathetic affection, 
those whose play is not in their own eyes mere play. And 
these, it seems, come nearest to realizing our idea of 
healthy, happy children. The utterly thoughtless, the 
silly, giggling little children, the dissipated youth—these 
represent not so much enjoyment as benumbed sensibility. 

Accordingly there would seem to be no enjoyment of life 
apart from a reflective attitude towards life. And this 
though the reflective attitude come only with a diminished 
vitality, making enjoyment seem sombre and subdued. 
When I seek to illustrate the attitude from literature, in 
the person of one who seems most to enjoy the life that 
he presents, I find that, paradoxical though it seems, my 
thought turns to Tourgenieff, albeit that so many of his 


214 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


pictures of Russian life are grave and sad. Yet the 
attitude of absorbed contemplation, at once questioning, 
discerning, sympathetic, which lies in the background of 
all of Tourgenieff’s realism; a certain sustained gravity 
which, in the “‘Sportsman’s Annals”, for example, imports 
the whole problem of life into a series of ostensibly de- 
scriptive sketches; this ‘‘divinest melancholy”, as Milton 
calls it, marks an element indispensable to any true en- 
joyment, to any satisfying taste of life.” Any enjoyment 
of life implies a sense of the mystery of life. No fool 
can enjoy life. 

To some readers this will seem a Pickwickian, perhaps 
a casuistic, version of enjoyment. They have thought of 
enjoyment as light-hearted; and heavy-hearted enjoyment 
appears to be a contradiction in terms. I will not pre- 
tend that my analysis is free from difficulty. It seems 
that any analysis of the critical life is bound to raise as 
many questions as it answers. But this only means that 
the crowning mystery of life is not so much the mystery 
of the universe as the mystery of ourselves. What after 
all is the object of the heart’s desire? If one could answer 
this—if, for example, ‘“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” 
could be put into a single poem—doubtless all else would 
be clear. Meanwhile the fact remains that if we enjoy 
pleasure we also enjoy pain; tragedy no less than comedy. 
Pain, it seems, becomes our pleasure. And you and I at 
least would not care to subscribe to an enjoyment solely of 
comedy. This would mean that we were fit only to be 
persons in a comedy. Nor does it help matters to suggest 
that true enjoyment is to be found in a “properly propor- 


5 After writing the above I am not sure that George Eliot would not furnish 
an even better illustration. 


THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE 215 


tioned mixture” of pleasure and pain, of happiness and 
disappointment, after the fashion of a well-seasoned dish. 
The figure is too crude. It suggests once more the con- 
sumption of physical goods. As a fact of consciousness 
enjoyment is not a consumption of goods but an experience 
of life. From this point of view a tragic experience of 
life may yet be an enjoyment of life, as giving an assured 
sense of the reality of life. JI may feel perhaps that a less 
intensive consciousness of life would be easier but this only 
marks the limits of what I have the strength to enjoy. 

On the other hand it means that for the deeper ex- 
perience life is more than ever an unsatisfied aspiration. 
The merely physical consumption of goods is a fact, com- 
pleted when the goods are consumed. If the desire for 
goods were only a fact parallel to the process of consump- 
tion, enjoyment would be similarly a fait accompli. 
Desire, however, involves consciousness—the consciousness 
of desire; and the conscious satisfaction of desire only 
reveals the further implications of the desire yet to be 
satisfied. 


§ 52 


The point may be illustrated in the matter of friendship. 
For the disciple of Epicurus, we remember, friendship was 
the most available and likewise the most fruitful sort of 
happiness. In ‘Harriet Frean” Miss May Sinclair 
presents a characteristic episode in which two boarding- 
school girls exchange pledges of “eternal friendship”, each 
of course promising the other not to marry. This naive 
confidence in oneself marks the youth of both sexes. 
Mature persons smile at these eternal friendships as Jove 
is said to smile at lovers’ vows. Experience of the condi- 


216 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


tions of life reveals the difficulty of maintaining a friend- 
ship; and self-experience reveals, alas! how quickly we 
forget. The Epicurean would therefore be careful not 
to demand too much. Carpe diem, he would advise. Re- 
member that human nature is frail. Jones who dined with 
you yesterday was delightful, interesting, appreciative. 
Tomorrow he will dine with your enemy, Brown, who will 
say unpleasant things about you. Jones will not only 
not resent them, he may even assent to them. But what 
difference does it make? You found him well disposed 
towards you yesterday. Clearly he enjoyed your company 
and you found him a good companion. That fact is 
your assured possession. As a person of sophisticated in- 
telligence you will then take what the gods give and ask 
no questions. 

But will this mark an exercise of sophistication or, 
rather, a repression of sophistication? I am well aware 
that the question may be answered in different ways. For 
my own part I can answer it only as follows. I think 
that an Epicurean tolerance for the weaknesses and diffi- 
culties of other men is a mark of superior intelligence and 
also of a fine morality. At this point the Epicurean 
attitude approaches the Christian forgiveness of sins. 
And it seems to me that the moral excellence of each con- 
sists in insight into human nature. But this insight, so 
far from confirming the substantiality of the enjoyment 
that you get from the friendship of a not very loyal friend, 
only reveals how little you actually do get; even less, it 
would seem, than the disciple of Epicurus, never optimistic, 
has reckoned upon. I will not deny that it is possible in 
a loose sense to enjoy the society of Jones though you 
know that he will laugh at you tomorrow. I deny that 


THE ENJOYMENT! OF LIFE Zi 


this is possible, however, in the stricter and the only true 
sense, in which you put the thought of Jones’s frailty and 
your enjoyment of his friendship into the same moment 
of consciousness and combine them into one act of thought. 
The one will then dissipate the other. To enjoy the society 
of Jones you will have to forget for the time being what 
kind of a person he is. You must cease to be sophisticated 
for the moment, create an illusion, and assume an artificial 
naiveté. You may indeed preserve your self-consciousness 
in a cynical enjoyment of Jones’s weakness; but this is | 
hardly an enjoyment of friendship. 

The point is not one of sentiment merely, but of logic. 
It is along the same line, for example, that J. S. Mill denies 
that a round square is inconceivable; for how may we say 
in advance of the fact that objects may not be found which 
will be both round and square? Or both enjoyable and 
worthless? To my mind the reply is simple. Nobody 
denies that we can say “round square”. But if our ut- 
terance is to be more than mere sound, it must mean some- 
thing. It will then appear that “round” means nothing if 
it does not mean “‘not-square’’, and that likewise “‘square”’ 
can mean only “not-round’”’. The effect of asserting the 
possibility of a round square is then not merely that you 
“contradict yourself’, or that you are “‘inconsistent’’—this 
seems possible enough until you see that what it really 
comes to is that you say nothing whatever, you are merely 
talking. In like fashion I shall not deny that you may 
extend to Jones all of the forms of courtesy and apprecia- 
tion, but with the consciousness of his worthlessness in mind 
you will not be enjoying his friendship. 

The Epicurean advises: in the matter of friendship take 
what you’ve got and ask no questions. My reply, then, is 


218 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


that if you ask no questions you’ve “got” nothing. For to 
ask questions is only to exercise your imagination (i. ¢., 
your intelligence). Without imagination there is no en- 
joyment; and when imagination raises a question the enjoy- 
ment must depend upon the answer. The enjoyment of 
friendship inevitably raises the question of loyalty; and 
then it appears that the seemingly sentimental consideration 
of “eternal friendship” is implied in the very logic of 
friendship. All of our expressions of friendship betray this 
implication. We speed the parting guest with Au revoir 
or Auf Wiedersehen and the desire for another visit. In 
all matters of personal relations the intensity of the present 
enjoyment is measured precisely by the longing for further 
intimacy. We may know that the conditions of time and 
place, the cares of family and business, and the limitations 
of our courage and our strength, will all conspire to defeat 
this longing; but these considerations we banish to the back- 
ground in order that we may now enjoy. Their presence 
in the background, however, moderates our enjoyment. 
And if by chance they get into the foreground the effect is 
chilling. If I am asked to meet a rare and delightful per- 
son, one who is certain to attract me, with the understand- 
ing that we are to meet only once, I shall probably say, No, 
it is not worth while; you might as well offer to lend me 
a single chapter of a novel. The pain will not merely out- 
weigh the pleasure, it will paralyse the pleasure. The 
Epicurean sage may then urge me to forget the temporary 
side of it. His advice will only sustain my contention that 
no temporary friendship can be enjoyed except as you forget 
its temporary character. 

The motive of friendship is very deeply involved with 
the motive of immortality, of religion, and of life itself. 


TIDE ENJOY MENDIOF DIFeE 219 


Just as the thought of the finitude of friendship chills the 
ardor of friendship so does the thought of death dissipate 
the zest for life. Therefore death is not mentioned in polite 
society. James points out that no one can think steadily 
of his own death. Suppose you approach a parent delight- 
ing in the contemplation of the vitality and promise of his 
children and then remind him that after not many years 
as the world goes they will have run their span of life; 
their bodies, which had already grown old and withered, 
will then lie mouldering in the ground; and the world will 
go on comfortably without them. The effect of this cruel 
experiment will be to show how deeply, even in less imagi- 
native men, the zest for life is bound up with implications 
of indefinite duration. If this is what it comes to, one will . 
feel, then what is the use of it all? It were just as well 
at least that the children had not been born. It was the 
aim of Epicurus, and especially of Lucretius, to give a 
positive value to life by showing that death is nothing: the 
finitude of life is therefore not an evil. It would be a 
strange person, however, who should be stimulated to a 
delight in life by reading Lucretius on death. 

The logic of the situation may be illustrated once more 
by considering the possibility of an Epicurean enjoyment 
of religion. Epicurus indeed wished to banish religion. 
Modern Epicureanism of the aesthetic sort sees no reason 
why religion should not be enjoyed as well as art (which 
indeed raises the same sort of issue) by treating religion, 
not as a belief in what we may call transcendental realities, 
but as a pleasing dream or picture. Surely the picture may 
be enjoyed, for itself, as something that we experience, 
without regard to its cognitive significance. This concep- 
tion of the value of religion, it is worth noting, is also pro- 


220 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


posed today by many who are hardly to be called 
Epicureans; by all of those indeed who, though treating 
religion as a merely natural, 7. e., psychological, fact, yet 
recommend the cultivation of religion on behalf of the com- 
fort of the individual, or of the welfare of the nation, or 
of the unity of humanity, or, it may be, of the perpetuation 
of the species. 

As a carefully premeditated expression of the Epicurean 
view I quote the following from Mr. Santayana: 


“In my adolescence I thought this earthly life (not unintelligibly 
considering what I had then seen and heard of it) a most hideous 
thing, and I was not disinclined to dismiss it as an illusion for which 
perhaps the Catholic epic might be substituted to advantage, as con- 
forming better to the impulses of the soul; and later I liked to re-+ 
gard all systems as alternative illusions for the solipsist; but 
neither solipsism nor Catholicism were ever anything to me but 
theoretic poses or possibilities; vistas for the imagination, never 
convictions. I was well aware, as I am still, that any such vista 
may be taken for true, because all dreams are persuasive while 
they last; and I have not lost, nor do I wish to lose, a certain 
facility and pleasure in taking these points of view at will, and 
speaking those philosophical languages. But though as a child I 
regretted the fact and now I hugely enjoy it, I have never been 
able to elude the recurring, invincible, and ironic conviction that 
whenever I or any other person feign to be living in any of those 
non-natural worlds, we are simply dreaming awake.” ® 


“And now I hugely enjoy it”. After what has been said, 
I need do little more than put the question. What does 
Mr. Santayana enjoy? The dreams as dreams (i. ¢., as 
sensuous images) or the freedom of taking them critically? 
I can conceive that either may be enjoyed by itself; or both 
alternately, according to mood. Can both, however, be 
enjoyed by the same person in one moment of conscious- 


6 From the essay, “On My Friendly Critics”. 


THE ENJOYMENT JOF LIFE tA 


ness? The trouble with the dreams seems to be that they 
‘‘are persuasive while they last”. This means that they are 
not mere pictures, or merely ornamental arrangements of 
color on the wall, but that they suggest a reference to real- 
ity. And thus to the critical mind they have the power of 
raising questions. The questions may conceivably leave 
the enjoyment untroubled—so long as they are only half- 
indolent questions and do not force the issue, whether the 
dream is only a dream. Little as I am fitted tempera- 
mentally to enjoy ‘“‘the Catholic epic” there are times when 
I find it impressive—because I suspect that nothing so 
catholic could be quite without significance. On the other 
hand one may banish the questions; but not, I should say, 
in the same breath in which one claims to be sophisticated. 
One may indeed be too resolutely sophisticated for the 
traditionally Epicurean repose of mind; but this will mean 
only that he who makes sophistication his profession should 
not expect repose. He should not expect to enjoy facts as 
facts or sensations as sensations. 


§ 53 


Accordingly for one who professes sophistication I can 
see no escape from a certain participation in what is called 
a “serious view” of life (“‘earnest” is Mr. Santayana’s 
deprecatory word). The only escape, if that be possible, 
is to profess nothing whatever; that is, to stop thinking. 
And “serious” I mean in the sense in which Thackeray 
speaks, half jestingly, half sympathetically, of “a person 
of serious views”, and tells us that the worldly Major 
Pendennis became “‘very serious” in his last days. Hence 
I am not interested in denying, but I would rather affirm— 
simply as a derivation from the Epicurean demand for the 


Leu MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


enjoyment of life—that a certain preoccupation with 
“eternal life” (Socratic, if we remember) is a positive mark 
of intelligence. After all I wonder what can be more char- 
acteristic of the critical life than wonder about the eternal 
significance of the life that is in us. It may be likewise 
intelligent to foresee that the wonder will not be satisfied; 
it will be no less true that to cease to wonder is to cease to 
think and thus to place an artificial limit, or to accept the 
limit of mental weariness, upon the exercise of sophisti- 
cation. 

The popular mind is likely to mistake a “stern and aus- 
tere” dogmatism for a serious view of life. To the really 
serious view dogmatism is abhorrent. And thus of any 
ostensibly “serious” person I would ask always how far 
his seriousness stands for imagination and critical in- 
telligence; and if not for a cultivated intelligence, yet for a 
native sympathy and understanding; how far, in short, it 
stands for an Epicurean sense of the variety and richness 
of life and of what each man’s life means for himself. I 
seem to find none of this in the dull and stern dogmatism 
so often exhibited by “persons of serious views”, or in 
the type of “‘seriousness” exemplified by many of Carlyle’s 
“heroes”. To me they are less serious than primitive. 
Without a critical appreciation of life I can conceive of no 
true seriousness, no real stirring of soul within the man; 
and any critical appreciation of life contains within itself 
the issues of “earnestness” and “‘conscientiousness”. No 
person destitute of imagination is entitled to be called 
either ‘“‘serious” or “moral’’. 

And this in spite of the obvious tendency of the critical 
attitude towards the sceptical and even towards the cynical. 
I will not pretend to understand the connection of motive 


TIME ENTOY MENT OF LIFre 223 


here. It is one of the deeper perplexities of human life 
that the self-consciousness which begets the search for truth 
is no less the parent of that scepticism which despairs of 
truth or scoffs at truth. But the two are by no means 
divergent. There is a scepticism which is mainly indolence 
or helplessness and a scepticism which is responsible and 
intelligent. I suspect that, in Freudian fashion, all re- 
ligious scepticism of the worthier sort is based upon positive 
religious feeling. Religious scepticism may thus easily 
stand for a juster sense of the meaning of religion than 
that religious pragmatism which so readily changes the 
character of God to suit the needs of the times. A man may 
say that “there is no God’’, not at all because he is a “‘fool”’, 
but because, precisely in his “heart”, he knows too certainly 
what he is seeking. 

Likewise of the relation between the serious attitude and 
the sense of humor. Here again there is a difficulty. 
Theories of humor constitute the least enlightening chap- 
ters of psychology, though nothing, it seems, is more in- 
timately connected with the function of intelligence. But 
here again the distinction is to be drawn between a vulgar 
and an intelligent sense of humor. Not every sense of 
humor is equally a mark of intelligence. It depends upon 
what you find humorous—perhaps upon the breadth of 
view revealed in the sense of humor. Yet I should say 
that apart from a fine sense of humor there can be no deep 
sense of truth. The most deeply religious soul I have ever 
known, a scholar of world-wide reputation, was at the same 
time, of all the men whom I have known personally and 
intimately, the most brilliant and the wittiest. And if this 
seems paradoxical let us remember that by common agree- 
ment (how properly, I will not say) the critical life finds its 


224 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


type and spokesman in the person of Socrates. It seems 
to me not too much to say that Socrates is presented to us 
as the subtlest of Greek humorists, finer indeed, to my sense, 
than either Aristophanes or Lucian. Yet for Plato Socrates 
is at the same time the embodiment of religious seriousness, 
while in Xenophon he seems rather oppressively ‘‘Victor- 
ian”. And it is likewise interesting to note that Augustine 
in his “Confessions”, perhaps the classical expression of 


reverential devotion, attributes a sense of humor to God. 


CHAPTER XIV 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 


§ 54. The particular nature of man. § 55. Biological evolution 
and the experience of thinking. §56. Thinking and imagination. 
§ 57. Imagination and human life. § 58. Imagination, morality, re- 
ligion. § 59. Imagination and the metaphysical problem. 


§ 54 


MONG the deservedly classical documents of moral 
philosophy are Bishop Butler’s “Fifteen Sermons 
upon Human Nature’, written in reply to Shaftes- 

bury. Shaftesbury had derived morality from ‘human 
nature’. True, is Butler’s reply, but what, then, is human 
nature? What is “the particular nature of man”? His 
answer to this question was given in terms of “reflection 
or conscience”. Butler’s question will be the question of 
the present chapter, and the answer to be given I conceive 
to be substantially in accord with the answer that Butler 
gave. 

The question may take various forms; among others the 
form of question implied in the distinction of the natural 
and the spiritual. Now the moral life I have defined in its 
various aspects as the critical, the thoughtful, the self- 
conscious life; and again as the spiritual life. But here a 
question may be raised. It may be objected that ‘‘the 
spiritual life’? conveys an implication not to be found in 


any of these other terms. For none of these other terms— 
225 


226 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


“critical”, ‘thoughtful’, ‘“self-conscious’—implies more 
than what is known as a temporal and worldly point of 
view restricted to the contemplation of natural fact, or a 
mental process which is more than the operation of a 
natural human faculty. The spiritual life, however, im- 
plies a preoccupation with a Platonic or Christian ‘“‘other” 
world of “eternal” realities, and a kind of supernatural 
insight. 

Well, then, the general meaning of my reply will be, so 
in the last analysis, as it seems to me, do all of the other 
terms. For myself it seems impossible to fix the concep- 
tion of a thoughtful existence, or of an existence in any 
proper sense conscious, upon a basis strictly “human” and 
“natural”. Thought, or consciousness, finds no comfort- 
able abiding-place in a natural world; nor is she very 
warmly welcomed by natural scientists. And psychology, 
which would give us the natural science of thought, is 
neither good science nor good poetry. In moral terms the 
humane which is neither the beastly nor the divine is in un- 
stable equilibrium; and the merely human refuses in the 
end to be distinguished from the merely animal. 

The question may also be stated in terms of the concep- 
tion of “‘life’. What is “life”? In other words, what is 
it that in the last analysis distinguishes human from animal 
life; and which of the two is then more distinctively rep- 
resentative of “‘life’? It is from this point of view that 
I find the most convenient approach to the question; and 
in particular through a consideration of the relation of 
human and animal life suggested by biological views of 
evolution—which in two generations past have revolu- 
tionized our thinking about human life and human nature. 


THE SUBSTANGE OF LIFE 227 
§ 55 


Before evolution, to put it simply, man was distinguished 
from all of the other animals by having an immortal soul. 
This was inferred from the fact that man differs from the 
other animals in his power of thought. Among the ani- 
mals, therefore, man was sui generis. And this distinction 
assumed such an importance that the similarities between 
man and the other animals passed relatively without notice. 
Evolution, however, has changed all of that. Evolution, 
we learn, has made it clear that man is only one animal 
among others. And as for the power of thought—thought 
is only one of the innumerable varieties of biological 
function, or organ; only one of those matters of detail that 
enable this or that species to survive in the competition 
for existence. As a biological function indeed thought is 
a unique success. Essentially, however, it belongs in the 
same category with the speed of the deer, the strength of 
the elephant, the horns of the bull, and the quills of the 
porcupine. ‘Thought is a natural fact, one among others; 
it has no special meaning. 

Now I have no wish to contest the theory of evolution; 
and certainly none to reinstate the idea of special creation. 
Yet as I study the “‘social” sciences of today and note the 
dominance of the biological point of view in all of their 
conceptions of human life, it seems to me that this seem- 
ingly naive pre-evolutionary view was after all curiously 
right. In our preoccupation with man as an animal we 
seem to have overlooked the characteristic feature of hu- 
man life. We have been so deeply absorbed in the 
“phenomena” of life that we have forgotten the expert- 
ence of life. Observers of life, we fail to remember that 


228 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


we ourselves are agents of life. In a word, we have been 
so strongly fascinated by the biological effects of thinking 
that we have forgotten what it means to sit down “in a cool 
hour” (Butler’s phrase) and have the experience of thought. 

Let me try to paint a picture; a more or less fanciful 
picture of course, but it must be in the first person. I am 
sitting before my study fire in the darkening hours of an 
early December afternoon before the lamps are lighted, 
and my cocker spaniel is on the rug before me, also con- 
templating the fire. I have been spending the day in a 
task of writing, and as my mind slowly frees itself from 
this, I see other problems ahead; letters to be answered, 
purchases to be made, courses to be arranged, the beginning 
of plans for next summer; but meanwhile (dreadful 
thought! ) Christmas presents to select. And then I think 
of my Christmases in other places where I have lived, in 
Germany in my student days, in New England, in the 
South and West, and on the Pacific Coast; and of the 
good companions and friends that I have had, here and 
there, whom I have in the past known so well, and whom 
now, to my shame, I rarely even remember. And then, 
strangely, there comes before me the picture of the little 
Irish newsboy, my admiration and my fear, who delivered 
our morning paper when I was a very small boy, and of 
the day when I saw him carried to the hospital, run over 
by a street-car, to die two days later; and then the picture 
of a college friend, one of the dearest fellows I have known, 
who sat on the side of my bed, as I was recovering from 
a slight illness, on the evening before our graduation, 
while we mapped out together our plans for the future. 
He was drowned a few days later. And it strikes me as 
somehow strange and uncanny that, in the many years 


THE SUBSTANCE ‘OF LIFE 229 


since, the world should have gone on without my college 
friend and the little newsboy—just as if they had never 
lived—while it has carried me along with it. And then 
I reflect that in a few years more or less it will drop me 
too; and the world which, though I may not like it over- 
much, I can hardly in thought separate from myself, will 
forget me as completely as though I had never been. 

But this seemingly obvious reflection strikes a note of 
strangeness. And I am suddenly reminded that here is a 
point of view which for the most part is quietly left out 
of my world of daily life—of the practical and real world. 
And viewed in the light of it—viewing time in the light 
of eternity—this practical and real world becomes rather 
strangely unsubstantial and illusory. Practical life, I dis- 
cover now, is sustained by a monstrous forgetting. And it 
is rather in the reflections of the cool hour—when, indeed, 
I should seem to others to be withdrawn from the world 
—it is here that I touch reality. 

And now in this moment of meditation, when with a 
kind of blessed relief I seem to be for a time all myself, 
it becomes suddenly clear to me that even in the broadest 
daylight of common sense, when spiritual vision is most 
dazed and blinded, I never do accept as real this world of 
common objects—stupid, “inert”, “unthinking” things, 
with no “speculation” in their eyes. What is real, I know 
certainly, is of a different sort, something living and 
significant. And this array of seemingly opaque “‘phe- 
nomena” I can see now, certainly if vaguely, to be in it- 
self the living expression of some sort of art, human if 
not also divine. Yet as I try to pursue reality further and 
get a sure vision of it, I seem to find the task overpowering 
and my mind appears to stagger under the burden. 


230 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


And then I begin to fear that I am getting “abnormal”. 
My neighbors, if they only knew, would suggest a sani- 
tarium. And so—I will walk down the street and smoke 
a pipe and exchange a little scandal with a friend before 
dinner. 

Meanwhile the dog is surveying the fire with a counte- 
nance suggesting to an observer hardly less reflection than 
my own. What is he thinking about? Not indeed about 
the Disarmament Conference, the unrest in India, or the 
future of the German mark. (I am writing in the year 
1922.) Does he recall his gambols with the neighbor’s 
dog of last summer in Maine and wonder if they will 
meet next summer? Or coming nearer home, does he 
say to himself that in three weeks the children will be home 
for their Christmas holidays, and then there will be life 
in the household? I would not venture to say just what 
the dog thinks, and for my purpose it is sufficient to take 
him as I find him. But if he knows anything about the 
approach of Christmas, about last summer and next 
summer, or possibly even about tomorrow, if he knows 
that the children are now “away”, at school, and have not: 
simply ceased to exist; if he can even conceive this dis- 
tinction; then he must have sources of enlightenment 
wholly unknown to us. Doubtless he knows that he had 
his daily meal, a few hours ago, because the sense of 
repletion is still present. It is probable that he will not 
begin to anticipate another meal, or even to think of the 
future in terms of food, until it is again suggested by the 
pangs of hunger or by the attendant household activities. 
Shall we say, then, that the dog’s imagination is confined 
rather closely to the temporal and spatial present while 
our own ranges broadly? Even this would be hardly ac- 


THE! SUBSTANCE IOBULIFEE Qaie 


curate. It would miss the most important point of differ- 
ence. For I am living, say, in this town and state of 
the United States of America, on a planet called the earth, 
in the year of the Lord 1922—all because I have been 
instructed in history and geography and because in this 
instruction I have been compelled to reflect, to order, to 
discriminate, and to form for myself a conception of the 
world in which I live. My temporal and spatial “present” 
is the expression of that conception. What the dog’s 
present may be I am at a loss to say. 

What, then, is he thinking about? From any human 
point of view we seem compelled to say, Almost nothing. 
In what kind and how much of a world, then, is he living? 
To me it seems, In almost no world. Does he even know 
that he is a dog? That I doubt most of all. Certainly 
not as I know that he is a dog, or as I know that I am a 
man. For this again is the fruit of some knowledge of 
biology; which, in presenting me with a certain system of 
distinctions and relations in the living world, enables me 
—like the sciences of history and geography—to locate 
myself in the world. 

Man, it seems, then, is the only animal who knows that 
he is an animal. He is the only self-conscious animal, 
let us say; which, so far as it be true, means to me that 
he is the only really conscious animal. He is a conscious 
animal just so far as he is a thinking animal. 


§ 56 


And thus to be a thinking animal is to have imagination. 
In this use of “imagination” I am deliberately disregarding 
the definitions of scientific psychology in favor of the more 
popular usage of poetry and literary criticism which makes 


, 


232 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


imagination equivalent to intelligence and uses “‘lack of 1n- 
agination” to suggest stupidity. ‘“Imagination” describes to 
my mind the experience of thinking for one who thinks. To 
one who merely observes the thinking being, thinking may 
easily appear to be nothing more than a photographic re- 
production of the physical environment (as in the older but 
still popular associational psychology) or than a biological 
adjustment to the conditions of that environment (in the 
newer fashion of psychologizing). Neither of these ex- 
presses the experience of thinking. 

Nor do I find this experience suggested in the tradition- 
ally rationalistic description of thought as “reason”. If 
“reason”? denotes only an operation performed upon 
symbols, or abstractions (to my mind the same thing)— 
if reason is only a sorting of cards or poker-chips the term 
hardly suggests the experience of one who thinks. And 
likewise if reason or thinking be described in terms of 
“analysis”; when “analysis’’, like chemical analysis, is an 
operation performed upon a given material which adds 


» nothing to the material. To think a given object, I would 


point out, is always to think beyond it; and therefore to 
think of possible other, and possibly preferable, objects in 
place of it. And thus to think is inevitably to question; 
and the depth and significance of the question is meas- 
ured by its range of imagination. 

The traditional psychology, whether rationalistic or as- 
sociational, marks off “imagination” as a consciousness of 
the fanciful (peculiar it seems to man, since the beasts are 
not granted imagination), from sense, or sense-perception, 
as a consciousness of present and solid reality common to 
man and beast. But where the boundary lies between the 
two no one has yet been able to show. I suggest that there 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 233 


is no boundary. To perceive the present clearly, or to be 
aware of it in any sense whatever, is just so far to view it in 
the light of what is not present—that is, of imagination. 
To be conscious of the temporal is to view it under the ° 
form of the eternal. When the present ceases to be 
illuminated by what is not present there is no consciousness 
even of the present. When in my meditations I become 
aware only of the fire before me, I am aware of nothing 
—I am asleep. Consciousness of any kind imples imagi- 
nation. All consciousness means that you are looking 
beyond and around the present object. 


§ 57 


The modern scientific point of view tends to assume, 
with prosaic common sense, that as a matter of course, the 
“content”? of mind must consist exclusively, or almost ex- 
clusively, of impressions derived from the existing objects 
of sense, and at each moment mainly of the impressions 
given by the objects then present. The soul, in a word, 
is a mirror of physical facts. These at any rate will be 
the content of every ‘‘normal” mind—which alone is 
respected by the scientific imagination or by prosaic com- 
mon sense—of every mind enjoying a normal experience 
of life. What is then at any moment left to “imagination”’ 
will consist of impressions of the past reproduced accord- 
ing to the laws of association, or of anticipations of the 
future automatically initiated by the operation of the same 
laws; all of which is prefigured in the photographic con- 
ception of mind. ‘Free imagination”, if such be con- 
ceivable, imagination indifferent to fact, present, past or 
future, or imagination critical of fact, will play the part 
only of an occasional indulgence like an after-dinner nap. 


234 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


From this point of view imagination is a waste product 
which the normal mind reduces to a minimum. 

I wish now to suggest that as a picture of actual life 
this view is grotesquely false; and gigantically false if it 
purports to give us the spiritual history of the race. Per- 
haps indeed tragically false—for I will face the possibility 
that the outcome of the suggestion may be only a sense of 
the vanity of life. Yet even so a sense of the meaning of 
“life”. The reader may perhaps recall the closing chapter 
in “Don Quixote” in which the dying gentleman, come 
as it seems tragically to himself, betrays in his parting 
words to Sancho the shock and blankness of disillusion. 
In this impressive conclusion one feels that the hero has 
turned upon his creator, revealing himself, in pathetic 
greatness, no longer as the tilter of windmills, but as the 
type, inevitably absurd from any standpoint of fact, of 
all who seek to give worth and dignity to life.’ But I think 
that one can hardly grasp this scene without turning with 
a certain suspicious insight to self. One begins to wonder 
whether, after all, the Quixotic world was much further 
from prosaic fact than the world of many another of us; 
whose illusions have not yet been revealed to the world, 
nor possibly to himself. I wonder of how many men it 
is not true—at least of those whose practical life is 


1The reader who is reminded here of the “Quixotic” philosophy of the 
contemporary Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, may be interested to learn 
that this and*the following chapters were completed, nearly as they now stand, 
before I had heard of Unamuno. Since then I have read nearly all of Una- 
muno with immense appreciation and delight. Besides Del Sentimiento 
Tragico de la Vida and Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, he has published 
several volumes of essays, also novels, short stories, poems, memoirs of travel 
in Portugal and Spain, and of his childhood and youth in the Basque proy- 
inces. To the English reader who would make the acquaintance of this re- 
markable man—a “passionate” writer wha never loses his critical sense—I 
recommend the two volumes of admirable translation by Mr. J. E. Crawford 
Flitch, The Tragic Sense of Life (N. Y., Macmillan, 1921) and Essays and 
Soliloquies (N. Y., Knopf, 1925). 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 235 


punctuated by moments of critical reflection—that they 
find themselves living in a world, and will insist upon 
living in it, which they suspect at times to be non-existent 
from the standpoint of fact. I myself have lived for 
thirty-odd years past amidst an academic tradition, some- 
what faint-hearted indeed, of the dignity of scholarship 
and culture. When the tradition conflicts with the fact 
academic men, professional lauditores temporis acti and 
believers in a Golden Age, turn as a rule to the past, as a 
sort of evidence that the academic tradition is grounded 
in fact. One may be permitted to doubt whether the 
dignity of scholarship has ever been or will ever be a fact. 

There are men breathing today who are living, however, 
in the Victorian age. And for myself, when I seek refresh- 
ment of soul, I turn ever again to the literature, particularly 
to the novels, of the Victorian age, to Thackeray or Dickens, 
to George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell, or even to Trollope or to 
Mrs. Oliphant, finding there, as I think, something home- 
like and familiar, civilized and intelligible, and in the fact 
of the Victorian age a kind of guarantee of the essential 
dignity of human life. Yet at times I suspect that the 
Victorian age never existed outside of books; and that 
present-day lovers of the Victorian age, permitted to re- 
visit that world as it existed in fact, would be mainly 
bored and disgusted. Yet I am not quite prepared to 
condemn the Victorian age as a fiction—not more at least 
than, with Vaihinger and Poincaré, I would stamp the 
entities of science as fictions. 

It may seem that this is true mainly of bookish men. 
Certainly I take it to be characteristically true of reflec- 
tive men. But I suspect that every man who lives at alk 
has a hidden imaginary world carefully guarded from 


236 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


public ridicule where he really spends his life; and if we 
could discover that world we should know the man. 
Anthropology tells us that the primitive man lives mostly 
in an imaginary world. And the little working-girl seated 
opposite me in the subway is reading (so I am told) Laura 
Jean Libbey—surely an imaginary world! Thus pathet- 
ically will she escape the facts of life. Yet where shall 
we find those who live in the fact? In the business world 
it seems that the “live” man is defined by a taste for ad- 
venture and speculation. And the big business man is 
likely to disclaim the sober purpose of making a necessary 
living in favor of a pure delight in the game. This is the 
man’s way of escaping the facts of life; the wife is prob- 
ably seeking forgetfulness in afternoon bridge, and dread- 
ing nothing so much as a day without engagements. All 
of which suggests a perplexing question, a question I should 
“like to put to Epicurus or Lucretius: why do men dread 
death and yet shun the facts of life? Why do they cling 
to life and yet find it a task to pass the time? 

Let no one accuse me, however, of desultory moralizing. 
I am trying to arrive at a sober psychological actuality. 
Lévy-Bruhl tells us, with some exaggeration indeed, that 
the primitive man fails to distinguish fact from imagina- 
tion. Modern science tells us that the civilized man, 
having achieved this distinction, has properly banished 
imagination. What I would suggest is that the world of 
the civilized man is no less a world of imagination, only 
(let us hope) of a more reflective imagination. Take the 
Victorian imagination once more. This is the world in 
which all of us have been educated who, lettered or 
relatively unlettered, represent in the United States the 
newly emphasized Anglo-Saxon tradition. This world of 


bE SS.U BS WAN CeO? DUPE 237 


our imagination underlies our sense of values, but no less 
our view of fact. It is a world unknown to the immigrant 
from Continental Europe; and hardly less, I fear, to our 
undergraduate sons; who tell us coolly that Thackeray or 
George Eliot may be good enough for the older generation 
but not for them. But what shall we do about it? Shall 
we see that the younger generation is educated in a world 
of sober fact, and thus spared the intellectual weakness 
of a mind burdened with tradition and imagination? 
Alas! Only the lower animals have no tradition; and 
they, as I have suggested, live in no world whatever. 

And if it then be our task only to separate imagination 
from fact, I think we shall be surprised by the magnitude 
of the task. Every moderately educated person carries 
with him as a part of his mental furniture some sort of 
history of mankind. I wonder how much of this has come 
from a study of sober history. How much of the history 
of the Victorian period has not come to us through the 
Victorian novels? And what else do most persons in this 
country know about the English people? Yet they do not 
doubt—and it is a question why they should—that the 
people whom they thus know are those who live in Eng- 
land; as little as those of us who have met the Russians only 
in the pages of Tolstoi or Tourgenieff or Dostoievsky doubt 
that we have some real knowledge of the Russians. We all 
think that we have a knowledge of the history of the 
race; and this knowledge is history and not poetry; yet 
which of us in his conception of the life of the race can dis- 
tinguish the history from the poetry? 

Yet in this kind of historical and geographical world we 
have a comfortable sense of reality. The question whether 
Hamlet was really insane, is a genuine question though 


238 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


referring only to the Hamlet of Shakespeare. Maggie 
Tulliver seems as real a person as George Eliot—Hamlet 
is certainly more real than Shakespeare. By the side of 
Major Pendennis, Napoleon seems, to me at least, rather 
legendary; and the Major seems to have more certainly the 
attribute of existence than half the people I read about in 
the daily paper. 

It is only the academic historian who appears to have 
any real interest in separating imagination from fact. 
And of him we may ask, when imagination is finally ex- 
cluded, what is left of the fact? Reading “The City of 
God” lately it seemed to me curious that Augustine, preach- 
ing the one and only true God, and explaining how the 
pagan gods were creatures of human imagination, still 
takes them naively as solemn realities; only not as gods 
indeed but as devils. But I remembered that in my school- 
boy reading of Homer and Virgil the gods were certainly 
real even though my background was that of the Augustin- 
ian theology. The pagan gods had been superseded by 
Jehovah and Christ, but they were of the same order. And 
this leads me to ask what kind of mental activity it would 
be possible to sustain within the world of Homer and Virgil 
and the Greek tragedians, or within the Greek civilization 
generally, while retaining a clear consciousness of the fact 
that the gods were only—names. One thinks again of the 
world of mediaeval Europe as a world governed and 
ordered in a peculiarly intimate fashion by the Christian 
God. I wonder whether any scientific historian studying 
this period can fail to think of God as real for the time 
being; and how he could then cancel God from his reality 
and leave the rest of his story a story of the real world. 

If I follow the suggestion of the natural scientist that 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 239 


he, rather than the historian, is the purveyor of solid facts 
(which are to be found in their most solid state in the 
sciences of physics and chemistry) I seem only to be con- 
fronted more than ever with—imagination. I have been 
looking lately into a textbook of physical chemistry, which 
science, I believe, claims above all others to reveal the 
nature of the hard and solid fact. What I found there 
was some very beautiful patterns of the arrangement of 
electrons, or ions, or what not, in the atoms of such sub- 
stances as common salt. I could find nothing salty in 
these patterns. And indeed I should say that they differ 
somewhat more from what is presented to me as common 
salt or the like than the Paradise of Milton or the De- 
lectable City of Bunyan or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More 
differs from what is presented to me as human life. I do 
not doubt that these physico-chemical patterns are fine 
products of thought and capable in a real sense of “‘veri- 
fication”. But then I have to wonder whether they alone 
among the products of human thought are capable of 
verification, and whether as products of imagination they 
are to be distinguished uniquely from its other products. 


Such, then, if you please, is the substance of life. For 
if there be no experience apart from imagination, must we 
not say that there can likewise be no life, in men or in 
beasts, apart from imagination? Certainly, it seems, if 
the term “‘life” is to denote any experience of living. If 
we are then to think of the lower animals as living creatures 
it seems that we must after all grant them imagination of 
some kind or degree. For the presence of imagination 
will then mark the only difference between being alive and 
not being alive; and this means that it will mark the ulti- 


240 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


mate difference between life and matter.* If, on the other 
hand, there may be life without experience of living, in the 
form of merely ‘“‘organic” life, it seems that we are left with 
no essential difference between an organism and a mere 
mechanism. It would be very interesting indeed to examine 
this conception of organic life, which, based upon the triple 
classification of matter, life, and mind, would offer us a 
‘life’ which is neither matter nor mind, and an “animal” 
which is not “spiritual” and yet not “material”. But since 
I am interested mainly in the “particular nature of man’ 
and its implications, I will return to the difference between 
man and the lower animals. 


§ 58 


And once more let us remember that among the vast 
multitude of animal species man is the only animal who 
knows that he is an animal; he is the only animal who is also 
a biologist.* ‘This statement has a wide range of implica- 
tion. Man is the only animal that can be said to have 
a history; that is to say, the only animal that lives today 
in the light of accumulated racial experience. He is the 
only animal who has a science; the only animal who can 
survey the present fact in the light of facts that are tem- 
porally and spatially remote. He is the only animal who 
may properly be said to have a society; that is, the only 
animal who can be conceived to act here and now in the 
light of recognized relations to his absent fellows. 


2 Note the significance in common speech of “being alive” to a fact or an 
implication; and note also the ground of one’s more instinctive appreciation of 
the presence of “life”, say in a meadow occupied by horses and cattle through 
which you are passing. The fact that (and the degree in which) the animals 
manifest curiosity towards an intruder seems more conclusively an evidence of 
life than the fact that they reproduce their kind. 

3 Some of what follows here is from my article on “Birth-Control and 
Biological Ethics’ in The International Journal of Ethics, Oct., 1916. 


Tite SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 241 


He is also the only animal who can be conceived to 
have any clear consciousness of family relations. Think 
of what the consciousness of family means in human life! 
Yet if it be a wise child that knows its own father it must 
surely be a wiser dog. The Australian blacks are said, 
by Spencer and Gillen, to be ignorant of this relation— 
though the claim is disputed by Andrew Lang. It may 
easily be seen, however, that the apprehension of this causal 
connection, between two events separated by a considerable 
interval of time, and under conditions of more or less 
promiscuity, calls for a fairly developed scientific imagina- 
ation. One may wonder how soon, if the knowledge were 
lost, it would be rediscovered. And some degree of imag- 
ination must be attributed to the bitch who recognizes her 
pup as her own after the period of infancy is past. Hence 
it is much to be doubted if she does so. 

In all of these relations it is the presence of imagina- 
tion that determines what they are for us; and that de- 
termines the meaning of the words used to refer to them. 
To speak therefore of “animal marriage” or of ‘animal 
society”, after the fashion of biological psychologists, is to 
leave Hamlet out of the play. “Marriage”, for example, 
denotes indeed a sex-relation; but a sex-relation between two 
persons who have deliberately avowed a preference for one 
another; who expect their association to be permanent; 
who have purposely given their friends ground for the 
same expectation; who know that the sex-relation is to 
include a common household and a common social life; 
who doubtless expect to be common parents of children; 
who at any rate know that this is the natural outcome. It 
is precisely this consciousness of the situation that invests 
marriage with moral responsibility and gives significance 


242 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


to the word. To apply the term indifferently to the sex- 
relations of men and of animals suggests to me not so 
much a significant scientific generalization as an in- 
dulgence in rather naive sentimentality. 

In a word, then, as distinguished from the lower animals, 
man is not merely more ‘“‘developed”, or more “efficient”, 
or simply more of anything. He differs from all other 
species by the fact that he has a culture; which means that 
he offers the only case in the animal kingdom where the 
processes of life are surveyed and criticized from the stand- 
point of those in whom they are taking place. And this 
is to say once more that he is the only animal to whom we 
may in any significant sense apply the term ‘‘moral’’. 

But then, just because he is the only moral being, man 
is the only animal who can be conceived to have a religion. 
Much mystery has been made of the origin of religion 
by those who find nothing mysterious in the presence of 
consciousness in the world. And if the mind be conceived 
as a photographic reproduction of the natural world, then 
surely the ideas of God, heaven, and immortality; or of a 
Platonic supersensible, or metaphysical world; of Kantian 
things-in-themselves underlying their appearances, or phe- 
nomena—in brief, all ideas of a realm transcending the 
realm of sense will constitute a mystery. How shall we 
account for the idea of the supernatural in a world purely 
natural? It <2ems that the mystery can only be explained 
—according to one’s logic of explanation—by recourse to 
special revelation on the one hand; or on the other to 
such counterfeit sense-impressions (from the naturalistic 
point of view—though naturalistically explicable) as 
dreams and visions of ghosts. 

For one who reflects upon “‘the particular nature of man”’ 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 243 


it seems to me that neither explanation is necessary; and 
there is no mystery—no mystery beyond the mystery of 
consciousness itself. For imagination, as I suggested 
above, is not an automatic anticipation of fact; as when, 
by association, I expect the sun to rise tomorrow or rain 
to follow thunder. Imagination means that we not only 
anticipate the fact but criticize the fact; and therefore that 
we can look for a more satisfactory substitute for the fact. 
Accordingly, to explain the presence in human thought of 
the idea of another world and another life we have only 
to fix our attention upon the fact that man alone among 
the animals knows that he is to die. I do not deny that 
animals have experience of dead bodies. Like ourselves 
they eat them. Yet how many persons entering a butcher’s 
shop feel themselves in the presence of death? Nor do I 
deny that animals shrink from death—at least from 
situations which we know to be fatal to them. This does 
not mean that they know what they are shrinking from. 
It calls for a somewhat extended reflection to know that 
death is the end of life; and especially to realize that this 
applies to you and me. ‘The primitive man, it seems, does 
not know this. He has not grasped the fact of natural 
death. When his friend dies, he asks, Who did it? Who 
cast a spell upon him? It is one of the seemingly ironical 
products of culture that in so far as we advance in the 
examined life, we live our lives in a shadow of certain 
death of which the unimaginative creatures can know 
nothing. The social device of banning death as a topic 
of polite conversation only reveals the shadow in the back- 
ground. 

And therefore as between the pre-evolutionary view which 
distinguished man as having an immortal soul and the evo- 


244 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


lutionary view which translates his soul into a competitive 
biological organ, or function, like the horns of the bull or the 
speed of the deer, I would point out that the older is after all 
the truer view for any insight into human nature—whatever 
be suggested by the external study of man as a biological 
species. Man is the only animal who can form an idea of 
a life beyond this, of a spiritual world beyond the world of 
nature. Not only can he form this idea, logically he must 
form it if he forms an idea of nature herself.* And by 
a logic no less inevitable he must protest against death. 
It seems to me therefore strictly true to say—precisely from 
the standpoint of “human nature”—that man is by nature 
immortal, even though we say that he is mortal as a matter 
of fact. Religious belief is no accident of sense-experience, 
due to ghosts or dreams. It is the inevitable suggestion of 
any reflective life. 


§ 59 


It is this intrinsic connection of religion with the life of 
a conscious being which (as I venture to conceive the 
situation) sets for us the central and ultimate problem of 
all being; the problem of the genuineness of morality, the 
problem of the meaning of life, the problem of religion, 
and the major problem of philosophy. For let us remem- 
ber that if consciousness were not essentially imaginative, 
at once creative and critical, if mind were indeed only a 
matter of photographic reproduction, extended by a process 
of association, then the problem of life would be solely a 
technical problem. It would be a problem of adjustment 


4J have in mind here the argument by which T. H. Green shows, in his 
Prolegomena to Ethics, that the idea of a natural world is possible only for a 
consciousness—for a person—who distinguishes himself from nature and there- 
fore himself transcends nature. 


THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE 245 


among given values and given facts—a problem of finding 
among the past experiences that which has been shown to 
fit the present fact—and not any problem of giving a 
meaning to life. And the problem of comprehending the 
world as a whole, which is one way of stating the problem 
of philosophy, would be the distinctively scientific problem 
of ordering facts under laws, with never a suggestion of 
any ulterior reality underlying the fact. 

But to grasp the full meaning of the problem we need a 
larger background than the contrast between human and 
animal life, larger again than the world of animate 
nature. For in this world of animate nature we are 
still relatively at home, within the relatively familiar 
and intelligible; and we may easily forget how insignifi- 
cant, from any external view, is this world in the universe 
at large. The full scope of the problem is suggested in 
that widely quoted saying of Kant that the two things’ 
most sublime within our imagination are “the starry firma- 
ment above us” and “‘the moral law within us”. I wonder 
how many persons pause to ask what it means to put these 
two things within a single sentence. 

A few years ago I listened to a distinguished astronomer 
while for two hours, to an unwearied audience, he explained 
what had been revealed by the latest developments of the 
reflecting telescope. As he unfolded step by step the vast- 
ness beyond all previous imagination of that silent universe, 
apparently lifeless, mindless, godless, the picture became 
ever more fascinating, but to me ever more oppressive and 
horrible. I admired the courage which enabled one to be 
an astronomer. At the close of his lecture he paused for 
an impressive moment, and then, to the astonishment of all, 
he recited, with the eloquence of a perfect sincerity, the 


246 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


psalm beginning with, “The heavens declare the glory of 
God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” If I 
could convey the effect of this to my reader I should have 
given him the problem in all of its dramatic significance. 
How can one—I will not say that one cannot—but how 
does one face modern astronomy and yet believe in God? 

For it is in the contemplation of the astronomical uni- 
verse that we face the deeper mystery of our existence; and 
of this universe, not as displayed in the calm beauty of a 
star-lit night, but as unfolded by the science of astronomy. 
Here we are bidden to remember that the earth, which is 
to us so vast, is but one of the minor planets in one of 
countless systems; that only very recently, geologically and 
astronomically speaking, has the earth supported life, and 
yet that the human race has existed for hundred thousands, 
possibly millions, of years. But only for a few thousand 
years does the race seem to have been very human or to 
have had any clear consciousness of itself as a race; and 
of the millions upon millions of souls who have lived dur- 
ing this historic period, for each of whom doubtless, as for 
you and me, his own life and the fate of his own soul has 
seemed to be the central and important fact of the universe, 
the names of only a few survive. What, then, does the 
world know about you or me? What indeed is the whole 
realm of life but a fortuitous concourse of atoms at one 
point in an infinity of space and time? 

Man, as I have said above, is the only animal who knows 
that he is an animal; and this to him means that he is the 
only important animal. Yet I have sometimes wondered 
whether this self-consciousness might not mean only that 
of all animals man is the most ridiculous and contemptible. 
And one may imagine—though whether one may, is pre- 


hae SUBSTAN eG EO he LLeE 247 


cisely the question—an ironical snail or oyster who, accept- 
ing the starry heavens above him, thanks God that he at 
least has no illusions of importance and has been spared 
the temptation to think of himself as other than he is. 

And yet again “the moral law within us”. My one pur- 
pose in this volume has been to present to the reader’s 
imagination, and to get into my own, all that is implied in 
“the moral law’’—so vastly more, I believe, than is sus- 
pected in any of the common talk about ‘sound morality”’. 
As I see it the moral law means nothing less than the su- 
preme and exclusive importance of the conscious life—of 
the person. Nothing is good, it asserts with Kant, but the 
good will. And with this assertion the moral law faces the 
starry heavens above and rejects all compromise—all of 
those utilitarian compromises which would reconcile life to 
fact by a renunciation of the meaning of life, all those 
which would make the consciousness of life an instrument 
of “life”. ‘The moral law” asserts the supreme value of 
the conscious life for its own sake; and therefore the su- 
preme value of each person for his own sake. With Kant 
once more, each is to be regarded always as an end in him- 
self, never as a means. This implies a truly “social” 
world; and what is much more, a social universe, a universe 
in which we may in some sense expect to find God. But 
this only means again that in the social universe each per- 
son is all-important. 

How can this assertion be made in the presence of the 
starry heavens above us—as the nature of the heavens is 
revealed by astronomical science? How can the starry 
heavens and the moral law both be sublime? For if any- 
thing be sublime it must at least be real. Yet if the firma- 
ment of science be sublime—which for science can mean 


248 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


only that it is big—the moral law looks like an accident; 
nay less, an illusion. And if the moral law be sublime the 
firmament of science seems similarly an illusion. 

Or may we say that the scientific firmament is a peculiar 
and limited version of a universe which in the end, under- 
stood as we understand the life of our human fellows, is the 
expression of the same moral law that we find in ourselves? 
This, I suspect, was in Kant’s mind when he declared the 
moral law and the starry heavens to be both sublime. 

And thus among the many problems set by the presence 
of the moral law is the problem of truth and reality, the 
problem of knowledge. Life is an activity of imagination; 
the world in which we live is a world of imagination; is it 
therefore an imaginary world? 


CHAPTER XV 
THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 


§ 60. The man of science and the man of culture. § 61. ““Mere 
ideas” and the picture-psychology. § 62. ‘Mere feelings.” § 63. 
Science and anthropomorphic prejudice. § 64. Truth and satisfied 
imagination. § 65. Error and lack of imagination. § 66. Experi- 
ence of reality vs. coherence and correspondence. 

MPORTANT among the moral questions as here con- 
ceived is the question, What is truth? In the answers 
commonly given it seems that truth is an impersonal 

relation: a relation of coherence among our ideas, for one 
view; for the other a relation of correspondence between 
ideas and facts. For these views it seems that truth is not 
a moral question—rather perhaps an “‘intellectual’’ question. 
I may then distinguish the moral question by asking, What 
is the experience of truth? 

But this will compel us to ask, What is the experience of 
“ideas”? And of “feelings”? And for the purpose of 
stating all of these questions I will suggest the following 
situation. 


§ 60 


Let us suppose that we have before us, in a college 
catalogue, the long list of courses constituting a modern 
curriculum. Half of the courses bear titles that are more 
or less unintelligible, each of them is to be identified in the 
end only by its number. The catalogue does not thus far 


seem to be very lively reading or at first glance very signif- 
249 


250 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


icant. Yet a moment’s reflection will tell us that what lies 
here listed before us is the greater part of the many and 
various developments or expressions of the human spirit. 
And what the curriculum would represent if it could, is a 
tout ensemble of reflective human life. 

If we now go a step further we shall find that by com- 
mon consent these studies are divided roughly into two 
classes, known respectively as the sciences and the humani- 
ties; or as scientific studies and culture studies. Typical 
scientific studies are physics, chemistry, and biology. Typi- 
cal culture studies are languages with their literatures—in 
a word, literary criticism; but also art and art criticism; 
and properly also (though not often found in the college 
curriculum) music and musical criticism. But to these we 
should add the study of philosophy, so far at least as philos- 
ophy includes moral philosophy, the philosophy of beauty, 
or the philosophy of religion. And thus we find on the one 
side science; on the other literature and poetry, art, music, 
morality, religion. On the one side (let us say for the 
moment) knowledge; on the other, taste, feeling and insight. 
It seems, then, that in the distinction of science and culture 
we have two worlds of discourse. By Royce they are named 
the world of description and the world of appreciation. By 
others the world of facts and the world of values. Having 
in mind the foregoing chapter I prefer to call them here the 
world of fact and the world of imagination. 

What, then, is the difference? Putting this question to 
a professor of science, he will probably answer as follows. 
All of these studies, he may admit, stand for operations of 
the human spirit. Science no less than the other studies 
has a human history. But in science—and in science alone 
—the spirit does more than operate; it operates upon some- 


Pubes XPERIENCE OOK) TR UT H psy 


thing. It grasps something which is other than itself. In 
other words, science is knowledge of reality. In these other 
fields of the spirit all that happens is a movement of the 
spirit within itself; a movement which at best yields pleas- 
ing images, ideas, or feelings—objectively, fiction. The 
not too developed scientific conscience may tolerate these 
diversions of the spirit as a kind of justifiable relief from 
the strain of scientific thought. The more resolute scientist 
condemns them in his heart as a sinful waste of time, and if 
unrestrained by the academic amenities he would probably 
explain that the proper place for a professor of literature 
is not in a university but in a sanitarium.' 

In a word, then, the world of science is a revelation of 
truth and reality; the world of imagination (as I prefer 
to call the other world) is a world of mere ideas and mere 
feelings. 

The attitude of the professor of literature towards the 
professor of science is probably no less supercilious (in his 
heart—for he too is restrained by the academic amenities), 
though in these days less confident. For him, however, I 
suspect that the scientist is no better than a carpenter or a 
clever machinist. The professor of literature feels that he 
himself has a grasp of something which the scientist has 
missed, and the scientist is then set down as “lacking in 
finer spiritual insight’. Insight into what? Well, at any 
rate, insight into human nature. In other words, science 
is not the only knowledge, criticism is also knowledge, 
knowledge indeed of human nature and human life. There 
is nothing in the whole range of literature, poetry, art, re- 


1To those who suspect me of exaggeration I will say that such is precisely 
the kind of recommendation made by a philosopher, an unbending exponent 
of the scientific point of view, for the benefit of those who differed with him, 
at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association not half a dozen years 
ago. 


252 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ligion, which is not such knowledge. But it seems that 
more than this is involved. It is hardly a satisfying theory 
of poetry to say that poets are occupied in describing to 
one another their personal states of mind. Rather, it would 
be said, their insight; insight into a reality which may be 
variously described as a realm of ideas, a world of imagina- 
tion, a spiritual world including and also transcending the 
human world. ‘The professor of literature, I say, is some- 
what less confident today than the professor of science, but 
at bottom we may suppose him to be cherishing the convic- 
tion (vital, it would seem, for any critical justification of 
his profession) that his world of imagination is somehow 
not less objectively real—rather it is more truly real than 
the scientist’s world of fact. If so there are no “mere 
ideas”. 

And so, Are there ‘‘mere ideas’? Such, it seems to me, 
is the deeper question involved in any issue of knowledge 
and truth. And the question includes the other question, 
Are there “mere feelings”? I shall meet the question by 
proposing the following disjunction: either the ideas (or 
feelings) in question are an insight into reality—into a 
reality which, like the reality which science claims to re- 
veal, is other than ourselves—or they are no “ideas”? what- 
ever, but bare words or other vehicles of expression. 


§ 61 


No one, I will venture to say, has ever experienced 
a mere idea. Modern philosophy, following Descartes’s 
Cogito, ergo sum, has been full of the notion that, while we 
may doubt the existence of the things to which our ideas 
refer, we can never doubt the existence of the ideas them- 


THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 253 


selves; and its ever-recurring scepticism has been, How can 
we assert the existence of anything except mere ideas? And 
yet if I ask you what is a chair you will easily tell me, 
but if I ask you what is an idea of a chair, and how it 
differs from a chair, you will be at a loss to reply. It 
seems that these most certain entities are the hardest to 
locate or to describe. 

Regarded as an entity, an idea is no more to be found 
in human experience than the atom of physical science. 
As a matter of experience we may say that the idea of a tree 
is one among the other aspects of our experience of the tree. 
It is that aspect which is suggested by such adjectives as 
“clearness”, “distinctness”, ‘familiarity’. The physical 
or “‘real’’ tree is of course neither more nor less ‘‘distinct”’, 
neither more nor less ‘‘familiar’”. When, however, I speak 
of an idea of a tree as a duplicate of the real tree I am re- 
sorting to a metaphor for the purpose of adjusting certain 
difficulties presented by a comparison of your experience of 
the tree with mine. When I myself see a tree what I see 
is just a tree; not any idea of a tree. But when I observe 
your seeing a tree—and most of what I observe is that you 
look at it—then I have to wonder how you can see the tree, 
at least the tree that Isee. For that tree is thirty feet high, 
and how it can get through your eye, and your smaller optic 
nerve, and so on, is more than I can understand. More- 
over, you sometimes claim to see a tree when for me there is 
no tree there. To settle these difficulties (rather than to 
explain them), I find it convenient to assume that what you 
directly perceive is not the tree but a symbol, or repre- 
sentative, of the tree—something like a picture, a bank- 
note, a baggage-check, or a poker-chip, the function of 


254 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


which is to represent. Upon this assumption rest the theory 
of representative perception and the correspondence-theory, 
or copy-theory, of truth. 

Among the possible representative metaphors the picture 
is the nearly universal choice. It is hardly too much to 
say that for common sense and for science alike the idea 
is just a picture—qualified, however, as a “mental picture” 
or a “mental image”. Upon this metaphorical basis is 
built most of the traditional psychology, especially that 
which makes a special claim to be ‘‘empirical”’, to communi- 
cate the facts of mind just as they are. This view, which 
makes of human life a gallery of pictures exhibited 
in succession, has been stigmatized by Bergson as the 
“cinematograph-psychology”; a comparison so apt in de- 
tail that we might almost conceive the cinema to have been 
invented for the purpose of objectifying the traditional view 
of mind. The synthesis of a succession of instantaneous 
pictures into an experience of motion illustrates precisely, 
when the process is reversed, the method by which for two 
centuries past psychologists have “analysed” all of the life 
of the soul into coexistences and successions of atomic “‘men- 
tal states”. As an explanatory metaphor, however, even the 
simple picture has a unique advantage. For it seems to us 
that pictures represent their object necessarily and inevit- 
ably. Their representative function is not a matter of con- 
vention as in the case of a poker-chip or baggage-check. 
At the same time there may be a picture to which no reality 
corresponds; it will then be a “mere picture”. Accordingly, 
by furnishing the soul with pictures we seem to explain, not 
only how our ideas always seem to be significant (as they 
might not seem if they were thought of as poker-chips), 
but how we may have significant ideas which are yet only 


THELEXPERIENCE OE TRUTH 255 


“mere ideas”. ‘Mere ideas’, of course, are “mere pic- 
tures”. 

What I will say, then, is that in our human experience 
there are, and can be, no mere ideas, mere pictures, or mere 
symbols. The purpose of the picture-psychology is to 
offer a ‘“‘scientific” theory of mind which will dispense with 
the person, that is, with the activity of “‘apperception”, or 
of imagination. But apart from the activity of imagina- 
tion a symbol is not a symbol, a picture is not a picture; 
and it “represents” nothing. As a brute fact a picture of 
course knows nothing; it is the person looking at it who 
knows. The plausibility of the picture-psychology, with 
its apparatus of “mental images’ suggesting one another, 
all rests upon the idea that pictures are somehow natural 
conveyors of knowledge. Yet a little reflection must show 
that the idea is the fruit of sheer innocence; of an innocence 
comparable only with that of an unlettered person who 
wonders at the stupidity of a man, though he be born 
French or German, who derives no intelligence from plain 
English; or of the innocence (of one of us perhaps) who, 
surveying a page of Chinese, doubts gravely whether true 
intelligence could ever be expressed in anything of that 
kind. I think many persons must have noted that a very 
young child—say, a child between one and two years old, 
and thus quite old enough to distinguish many of the ob- 
jects about him—derives nothing from a picture. Show 
him a picture of his mother, and he smiles wonderingly 
in reply. The late Carl Lumholtz tells us that the Aus- 
tralian blacks saw nothing in a photograph of himself. 
And what, then, of ourselves? I think we are all inclined 
to wonder how the cave-man, or the child of four or five, 
could suppose his crude sketches of animals to be rep- 


256 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


resentative of reality. And in looking at a Japanese print 
I can only wonder what idea or scheme of representation 
the artist had in mind. It does not easily occur to me 
that, unconscious of any scheme of representation, he might 
regard this as only the natural way of presenting the object. 
And yet why should he not? In brief, a picture or an 
image is one kind of symbol—one kind of language— 
among others. It has no more meaning per se, and no 
more self-evident cognitive power, than the Morse code. 
For it is only imagination that knows. 

And this means that so far as imagination is awake and 
active we no longer merely “‘have a picture’; we face 
reality. This is true even when in the physical sense we 
are facing a picture. I hold, for example, in my hand a 
photograph of Westminster Abbey upon which my eyes 
are resting. From a physical point of view the facts are 
simple. But now when I reproduce the photograph in a 
mental picture (so to speak) and say that I have also a 
picture of the Abbey in my mind, the whole situation is 
dissolved. For so far as the picture I am assumed to 
have fulfils its functions as a picture I no longer “have” 
anything. I see Westminster Abbey. Or better, I am in 
the presence of the Abbey; and thus far the Abbey is not 
represented but presented. On the other hand so far as 
the picture is in evidence—so far as I only “‘have a picture” 
of the Abbey—I have not even a picture. To say, in 
other words, that I am not in the presence of the Abbey 
but only in the presence of the picture is to reduce that 
picture to the meaningless thing it would be if I could 
view it with what the draftsman calls “the innocence of 
the eye’, and see it, no longer as a picture, in perspective, 
but only as a certain distribution of light and shade. 


THE EXPBERIENGE OF TRUTH bie 


There are certain ingenious stereoscopic pictures which 
‘illustrate the point nicely. Viewing them with the naked 
eye all that I can make out as a uninitiated observer is a 
rather complicated tangle of straight lines, all now in one 
plane—not a picture of anything. I shall be told, how- 
ever, that this tangle is a picture in perspective of a rather 
simple arrangement of lines, or threads, in three dimen- 
sions. And when I survey the card through the stereo- 
scope (but only then if imagination gives the cue) 
suddenly the perspective meaning of the picture is revealed. 
I use the word “‘revealed’”’ because this word alone is just 
to the dramatic contrast between the two experiences. But 
now in this second experience it is quite false to say that 
I “have a picture’. A picture, let us remember, is all in 
one plane. But what I now see is in three dimensions 
and in several planes,nearer or more remote with reference 
to myself. In brief, I am in the midst of an objective 
situation. 

The printed page is another illustration. I am reading 
Doughty’s ‘“‘Arabia Deserta” in the quiet of the midnight 
hour before going to bed. If I chance to grow dull and 
sleepy, then what I find before me is just a printed page. 
But while imagination remains awake I am in the Arabian 
desert even though I am also in my easy chair. 

And therefore my thesis: there are no mere ideas. All 
experience of mind is insight; and thus, as experience, an 
apprehension of a reality other than myself. The possi- 
bility so often suggested in modern philosophy that our 
whole world may be nothing but “mere idea’ and all con- 
sciousness illusion, is meaningless for mental experience. 
It presupposes that mental life is life in a picture gallery. 
This view of mind, as I have pointed out, is the fruit, not 


258 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


of experience of mind, but of observation of mind, rather 
of observation of behavior, of other persons. It is thus 
not more nearly related to the experienced realities of mind 
than the observation of toothache is related to having a 
toothache, or the observation of love to being in love. 
The question as I am thinking of it is not how it looks to 
have a mind but (if you please) how it feels—what it is 
to be conscious. For one who is conscious there are no 
subjective “‘mental states’? waiting to be attached, on the 
one hand to a knowing person, on the other hand to a thing 
known. In any degree whatever in which you are con- 
scious you are aware, however vaguely, of a distinction 
and a relation between yourself a knowing person and a 
known which is other than yourself. Any one who thinks 
is just so far a person confronted with reality. 

This means that consciousness, or spirit, is not in any 
sense a “‘state”’ as digestion is a state; or if a state, con- 
sciousness is a state of knowing something other than my- 
self. Nor is consciousness an “effect”, the effect of an 
external object stamping itself upon a tabula rasa; or if 
an effect, it is an effect which, as a consciousness of effect, 
somehow knows not only itself but the system of things 
constituting its cause. Nor is consciousness a “‘reaction”’ 
(to speak with the vulgar). If a reaction, consciousness is 
at any rate a reaction which knows why and to what it 
reacts. As against these banalities of popular psychology, 
I turn rather to Walter Pater’s characterization of the 
mind as essentially ‘vision’. Yet this too may be mis- 
leading. It may be that vision, as the best developed of 
our senses, is highly significant for the nature and mean- 
ing of all. But mere vision seems to me too cool, too dry, 
too possibly superficial and disconnected from all of the 


THE EXPERIENCE OF ‘TRUTH 259 


other functions that make up our spiritual being—through 
which also we apprehend the various natures of objects— 
to stand alone as the mark of the spirit. And therefore 
I prefer the term “insight’”—imaginative insight. 


§ 62 


Just as there are no mere ideas, so likewise are there 
no mere feelings. And not even for the earth-worm—who 
for popular thought stands close to the boundary between 
mere physiology and the least possible psychology, and is 
said to have a vague sort of feeling, but no cognition. 
Put yourself, then, in the place of such a worm crawling 
up, after the rain, between the bricks, and just over the 
edge of a brick, of an old-fashioned sidewalk. Now of 
course he does not know the brick as we know it, as the 
product of a brickyard. But what does he feel? If he 
feels the brick then it seems that thus far he knows that 
a brick, or something, is there determining for him his 
scene of action. Or does he feel, not the brick, but only the 
worm? If so, he is gifted with remarkable powers of 
abstraction. Or does he feel no difference between the 
brick and the worm? In that case he feels nothing; and 
there is no feeling, but only (say) digestion. 

Pain again is insight; indeed a most illuminating in- 
sight. Those who keep personal feeling and knowledge 
of fact in separate psychological compartments should tell 
us what could be known of the world by a creature which 
‘had never suffered pain. The crudest bodily pain is an 
apprehension of a fact; of a disturbance located some- 
where, and never indifferently in tooth or toe. Any pain 
contains indefinite possibilities of vision. In my own 
very slight experience of pain I recall an instance, not 


260 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


very tragic as a matter of pain, which amounted to a 
kind of conversion. At the climax of a splitting headache, 
just before pain yielded to the sleep of exhaustion, and 
just as I began to wonder, somewhat impersonally, how 
a head that throbbed like mine could much longer hold 
together, my mind seemed suddenly opened to the terrific 
possibilities of sentience in all organic matter; to sentience 
indeed as essentially inherent in all matter whatsoever; 
suggesting, not very cheerfully at that moment, that our 
human sentience is but the tiniest drop in a world of senti- 
ent experience. In the same moment I seemed to see 
before me the tragic experience lying behind the daily 
record of accident, suicide, murder, even of divorces and 
of strikes; and for the first time it occurred to me that a 
pessimistic philosophy of life might have something to say 
for itself; at any rate that one who had reached the pes- 
simistic conclusion need not be merely a fool. I dare say 
I am here only recording the experience of many another. 
The next morning we forget. Does this mean that the 
vision was wholly false? 

But this is to suggest once more that all distinctions 
between sane and morbid vision, between normal and 
abnormal views of life, are mainly conventional. And if 
I were writing a theory of knowledge it would be my chief 
purpose to show that standards of truth and reality have 
the same utilitarian status as standards of morality. It is 
needless of course to deny the comfortableness for all 
ordinary moods of the society of sane persons—if they 
are not too obstinately sane. And I suppose that as a 
worldly-wise parent I should counsel my son to prefer as 
his wife a sane and sensible woman to a spiritual genius. 
But this only shows in the end that by sanity we mean a 


THESE XPERIENCE OF LR UTE 261 


convenient similarity or communicableness of temperament 
and point of view. In the last analysis there are at least 
as many types of sanity in the world as there are languages; 
of which your type of sanity or mine is only one. No 
Anglo-Saxon, I will repeat, can think of a Frenchman as 
either quite sane or quite moral; and in French literature 
the Englishman is treated always as a creature strangely, 
if also splendidly, barbaric. Yet it is certainly a contra- 
diction in terms, a reductio ad absurdum, to condemn a 
whole people—for example, the Russian people—as 
“morbid”. But why, then, visit this condemnation upon 
any single sentient soul just because he happens to be 
different? That may mean that he can see what the rest 
of us fail to see. Surely this has happened often enough 
in the history of the race. 

Hence I am disposed to think of each individual organ- 
ism, of each peculiarity of personal temperament, and of 
each individual fate as a special opportunity for insight into 
reality. This applies not alone to “morbid” temperaments, 
but no less to exceptionally glad and happy natures, and 
perhaps conspicuously to such exceptionally “vital” per- 
sonalities as Shakespeare and Goethe. If poverty and 
disease are revealing, leisure and vital abundance may be 
no less so. Yet the morbid temperaments are possibly the 
more instructive because theirs are the deliverances which 
are most likely to be questioned. It is therefore well to 
remember that if a man is blind, or crippled, or otherwise 
debarred from participation in common social activities, 
this may mean only that some of his senses are exceptionally 
acute, or that he is exceptionally placed for reflection upon 
life, and possibly even for stimulating his fellows to a 
sense of the meaning of their own lives. In a curious 


262 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


book of some thirty years ago, J. F. Nisbet* sought to 
prove from a comprehensive survey of men of genius that 
all men of genius are potentially insane, at least in the 
sense that genius is inseparable from a morbid excitability. 
So much, however, was suspected before. Genius, we 
might say (after Croce), is only a peculiarly intensified 
consciousness of life. We may therefore reasonably ask 
whether an absolutely sane person would be quite a human 
being. 

A highly interesting study in this connection is the 
Russian novelist Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky was an epilep- 
tic. The epileptic fits, I have read somewhere, began, or 
began to be periodic, after an exceptionally racking ex- 
perience. Dostoievsky was stationed, blindfolded, with 
three others, to be shot as a political criminal, and the word 
to fire had almost been given when the reprieve came and 
he was sent to Siberia. It is significant that one of his 
companions went mad on the spot. Dostoievsky’s novels, 
all written after that date, are morbid, I suppose, if any- 
thing is morbid; though I think that their morbidity may 
be exaggerated by a too impressionistic reading. Read 
carefully, they reveal not only marvellous powers of 
perception but shrewd judgment. It is recorded by 
Merejkowsky * that each epileptic fit was the climax of an 
intensely impetuous mental activity, accompanied by an 
exceptional clarity of vision. Now I have never enjoyed 
the experience of an epileptic fit, but in former days it was 
a frequent experience to discover that an exhilarating sense 
of mental power was the forerunner of a prostrating nervous 
headache. But what of it? I suppose that few of us 


2 The Insanity of Genius. 
8 Tolstoi as Man and Artist; with an Essay on Dostoievsky. English trans- 
lation, N. Y., 1902. 


Pit sE xX PER TENCE O ERT 20 rH 263 


would care to purchase intensity of vision at the cost of 
epilepsy. But granting that intensity of vision is a morbid 
“effect”, does it follow that the vision is any the less true? 
Does it not rather follow that epilepsy is exceptionally 
revealing ? 

If indeed we are to speak of cause and effect in this 
connection, then we must note that normal experience is the 
effect of normal conditions and every experience an effect 
of something. The solution of a mathematical problem 
may be the effect of a night’s rest or a cup of tea; the solu- 
tion is not therefore to be suspected. Intellectual clarity 
after days of dull and hopeless perplexity may be the 
effect of a cathartic; the clearness will be none the less 
objective. And thoughts of love are none the less of true 
love because they are induced by the moonlight. When 
persons forget themselves they may reveal themselves— 
even to themselves. Nor is it a final condemnation to say 
that this or that judgment is the effect of a prejudice. If 
prejudices are blinding, they are none the less revealing. 
A man’s enemies are at least well equipped to detect his 
weaknesses. And on the other hand the mother, who in 
the daily round of getting the child up and putting him to 
bed sees him in his most intimate moments, is better situated 
than others to grasp the uniqueness of his individual per- 
sonality—which need not, however, be imposed as an 
article of faith upon visiting bachelors. 


§ 63 


For the scientific or matter-of-fact point of view the 
participation of temperament or feeling in cognition means 
that reality is viewed “through a medium”; and every 
medium is per se a distortion. Or it suggests the taint of 


264 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


‘“anthropomorphism’’; man creates nature, the world, God, 
in his own image. But in whose image, I am obliged to 
ask, can God be made intelligible to man? In whose image 
can he speak to man? Shall we say, in no image? In 
no language? In terms purely impersonal? One could 
better comprehend the possibility of impersonal, unmotived 
and ‘‘mediumless” thinking if science would furnish an 
example. For myself, I am impressed rather by the very 
palpable presence of human motive—of the soberly prac- 
tical and business-like sort, however, or else of the en- 
gineering sort—mechanicomorphic rather than anthropo- 
morphic—in all scientific thinking. And it seems to me 
that Bergson’s suggestion—that the mechanical theory of 
life, which construes organic development as a series of 
distinct operations, like a factory-system, is a reflection of 
man the machinist—amounts virtually to a demonstration. 
Yet I would not deny that the mechanical theory may in 
the end embody one of the possible ways of describing 
the process of life. 

As for the unwearied delight of scientific men in sim- 
plicity of formulation, and in the “law of parsimony”, 
which implies that the simplest statement is the truest— 
well, I would not deny the (to me tautological) statement 
that truth must be in some sense “‘simple” to be intelligi- 
ble; but it strikes me as a huge anthropomorphism to 
suppose that simple statements are distinctively statements 
of reality. This assumes that nature has kindly shaped 
herself to the measure of our understanding. One might 
rather suppose that simple statements would be suspicious. 

Whatever else science may be, it remains, I should say, 
a medium, a method, a convention, a point of view, no 
less humanly motived in its own way than other points of 


Petihe HX PERT ENG E Or sR UT H 265 


view, but one among others and no less potentially distort- 
ing. And when science makes the exclusive claim to be 
authenticated by facts it is well to remember that only those 
facts authenticate which are communicated and put to- 
gether, and that if an age be sufficiently dominated by the 
scientific convention none will be communicated (if even 
perceived) which fails to authenticate. In the Middle 
Ages I fancy that most of the facts authenticated the 
biblical tradition. And though I have no lively faith in 
“psychic phenomena’’, yet when I find so many men in 
their more confidential moments (when encouraged by a 
similarly confidential attitude in others) avowing experi- 
ences of the “psychic” sort, I am compelled to wonder 
whether there may not be here an immense field of ex- 
perience which is not communicated. At any rate it seems 
clear that science like any other convention may play the 
part of a Freudian “repression”. 

This, I will beg the reader to note, is not to reinstate 
the crude anthropomorphism of primitive man. There is 
all the difference in the world between thinking that knows 
that it is anthropomorphic and thinking that does not 
know, between thinking that knows that it is prejudiced 
and thinking that is blissfully unaware of prejudice. The 
primitive man does not know that his thinking is an- 
thropomorphic—it is we who know that. And I fear that 
the man of science very often does not know; at least he 
commonly refuses to admit that the presuppositions of 
science have logically the status of human prejudices. It 
is through the consciousness of prejudice that we escape 
the bondage of prejudice, through the consciousness of tem- 
perament that temperament reveals. As Socrates taught 
long ago, it is precisely our knowledge of self that opens 


266 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


our eyes to an objective reality. We can never possibly 
view the world from other than a human or a temperamental 
point of view, but we may perhaps discover what our 
point of view is; and then we shall know what our tem- 
perament discovers in the world. This I conceive to be 
the true meaning of the critical process, so far as it has 
gone, whereby science has freed us from primitive supersti- 
tion. Yet howsoever sophisticated, our thinking remains 
human thinking; and when our thinking ceases to be hu- 
man it will cease to be thinking. 


§ 64 


To say that all consciousness is insight does not mean 
that all thought and feeling are indifferently true—not 
any more at least than to say that all conscious action is 
moral action means that all conscious action is indifferently 
moral. For the distinction between truth and error I may 
then remind the reader of Chapter XII, wherein it was 
shown that all moral distinctions are distinctions in the 
degree of self-consciousness. In like fashion is the dis- 
tinction of truth and error a distinction of self-consciousness. 
That want is good which after criticism, challenge, trial 
and error if you please, knows what it wants; and that 
insight is true which after a similar ordeal knows what 
it means. It is true, in other words, so far as it knows 
what it means. From this relativity (if it be such) there 
is no escape within human life. The distinction between 
error and truth is then a distinction between before and 
after a given process of criticism. And just as there is no 
standard of morality, so is there no standard of truth. 
The final question about a want is, Do I still want it after 
knowing what it is I want? And the final question about 


THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 267 


a meaning is, Do I still mean it after knowing what I 
mean? And just as a want that admits defeat by criticism 
is shown really to have wanted nothing—not indeed to have 
been a want, but only some kind of bodily reaction—so is 
a similarly defeated meaning shown to have meant nothing. 
And then I was not thinking but only talking. 

Not thinking, I say. In the sense to be attached to this 
word lies the point of the whole matter. For “thinking” 
seems to suggest “ideas”. And the term ‘‘idea’’, very con- 
venient for marking off a subject of discourse, has a 
doubtful connotation. Almost inevitably it suggests “‘ab- 
stract ideas”, “mathematical thinking”, thought divorced 
from imagination; and thought divorced from imagina- 
tion is for me simply words. Any experience of thinking 
is concrete thinking. ‘Thinking in images”, it is some- 
times called, but for me thinking about something, think- 
ing directed upon some more or less definite subject-matter 
—or object-matter. And with Berkeley I am obliged to 
say that whenever I think about a man, it is about some 
definite man, or men, each with definite qualities. 

To think is then to imagine. But this is not to imagine 
anything you please. And therefore I dispute that state- 
ment of Berkeley in which he says that “I can imagine 
a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined 
to the body of a horse.” The latter, for example, I can 
easily enough say. But when I come to imagine how the 
insides of the man are joined to the insides of the horse 
I find myself in trouble and confusion. And then I dis- 
cover that I am not at all imagining a real man and a real 
horse but a stone man and a stone horse which I have 
seen joined in some gallery of sculpture. 

Accordingly, I will answer the question about truth by 


268 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


saying that experience of truth is the experience of a 
satisfied critical imagination. Or I might say that truth 
lies in fullness of critical imagination. If imagination is 
full it is bound to be critical—try to join the insides of 
the man and of the horse and you will have questions 
in plenty. And imagination can hardly be critical unless 
it be full. When Mill tells us that he can conceive of a 
round square, he offers plenty of opportunity for assertion 
and counter-assertion but little to think about. 

This means that the experience of truth is neither the 
logician’s experience of truth nor the scientist’s experience; 
neither of which I can recognize as a personal experience. 
It comes nearer to the conception of artistic truth, or poetic 
truth; or, if you please, of moral truth. And this truth 
I hold to be an insight into reality. 

Hence truth is, once more, a matter of criticism, just as 
(as shown in Chapter XII) morality is a matter of criti- 
cism. And criticism, in morality, in art, in logic, is a 
search for thought, vision, inspiration, behind or in the 
form of expression. A year or two ago it occurred to me 
to look again at Poe’s “Raven’’, which had thrilled me as 
a boy, and which I had not read in many years, to see if 
I could find any meaning in it. Perhaps it was because 
the hour was late and I was sleepy, but I found little. 
But the illustration will enable me to put the truth-situation 
simply, if baldly. Does the croaking of the raven, viewed 
critically, convey to you the vision of a dim, mysterious, 
unearthly realm? Is there any meaning in his ‘“Never- 
more’? If so, I suggest, that realm is objectively real. 
And if it be not real there is no meaning and the raven is 
only croaking. 


THE*EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH 269 
§ 65 


If this is truth, then what is error? Many a theory of 
truth has been shattered by this mischievous question. 
But the question is so important that, although I am not 
offering here a systematic theory of knowledge, I turn aside 
for a moment to suggest the answer—by means of a single 
illustration. The answer is that (if truth is a matter of 
imagination) error is a lack of imagination. 

And as an illustration I will take the classical puzzle 
of the bent stick—the stick half immersed in water which 
appears broken. We may distinguish several stages of 
sophistication. At what we may call the lowest stage (to 
which some present philosophers would have us return) 
a man may say simply that the stick 7s broken by the 
water—and makes itself straight again in coming out of 
the water. But this view would be quickly dissipated by 
the suggestion, among others, that under the same cir- 
cumstances one’s leg does not feel broken. The view is 
too unsophisticated for modern reflection. 

At a higher stage of sophistication, the stage reached, let 
us say, by common intelligence of today—also, I suspect, 
the stage at which many of our standard “illusions” are 
defined as such—at this stage the bent stick is described 
as an illusion. By this it is meant that I do not see the 
stick as it really is or as I ought to see it. But a little 
further reflection should show that this view is itself an 
illusion, in the sense that it marks an imperfect imagina- 
tion. If I see the stick other than bent, or broken, it 
seems there must be something amiss with my eyes. The 
view is unconscious and lacking in imagination in two re- 
spects. First, it takes no account of the circumstance that 


270 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


half of the stick has passed from air to water. In other 
words, it takes no account of refraction; and this because 
the difference of medium, easily perceptible as fact, has 
somehow failed to suggest any questions. Secondly, it 
assumes naively that the stick in air is the real or standard- 
stick—as if in a world where perception occurs under such 
a variety of conditions a standardized way of seeing things 
could be anything but a useful convention. When these 
considerations are introduced the “illusion” disappears. I 
ought, it seems, to see the stick broken when it is half 
immersed. 

But there is a conceivably higher stage of sophistication 
at which this now asserted ‘‘ought” will itself prove doubt- 
ful. Suppose that a man had worked the experiences of 
refraction so completely into his imagination as to be im- 
mediately conscious under all circumstances of the nature 
of the medium of vision and of its precise effect upon the 
image of the object. This would mean that with equal 
immediacy he could see the precise effect of substituting 
any other medium. He would then have reached the stage 
of sophistication of the skilled musician who plays in one 
key what is written in another and finds it unnecessary to 
transpose the score in writing. At this stage one key is 
as good as another, one medium as true as another. Yet 
there remains the distinction of truth and error—you must 
not mix the keys. And this distinction is solid and real 
so far as unsophistication is solid and real. Error is thus 
real. Its reality is none the less resolvable into a lack of 
imagination; into a failure to reflect that all vision is 
mediumed vision, standard-vision with the rest, and a 
corresponding failure to note what your standard medium is. 

But all of this is to suggest that the current scientific 


THEE SPR REEN GE VOR LE UT Ze 


and every-day view of things, which lives by the habit of 
standards, is of necessity highly conventional and thus far 
very incompletely sophisticated. 


§ 66 


The picture-theory of mind, as I pointed out above, im- 
plies the correspondence-theory of truth as opposed to the 
coherence-theory. In this opposition we have the tradi- 
tional antithesis of fact and idea, of induction and deduc- 
tion, of verification by fact as a criterion of truth versus 
consistency of idea. Truth as fullness of critical imagi- 
nation I conceive to be committed to neither theory though 
partaking of the motives of both. Consistency? Yes by 
all means. With Berkeley I should say that “it is a hard 
thing to suppose that right deductions from true principles 
should ever end in consequences which cannot be main- 
tained or made consistent. We should believe that God 
has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men.” But 
“consistency of idea” or of “principles” suggests a bare- 
ness, a mere-wordiness, which amply justifies those who 
deny that “ideas” can grasp realities. 

On the other hand nothing is verified by brute fact. In- 
deed I do not know whether we might not translate the 
antithesis of idea vs. fact into a case of words vs. blows. 
Neither gives truth. The facts must satisfy the imagina- 
tion. Suppose that twelve honest and intelligent men 
swear to you that, having carefully measured a small 
triangular piece of ground, they have found the sides to 
be three, four, and five yards long respectively, yet all the 
angles acute angles. Will you believe them? Or, better, 
take the experience of the inventor—which in the interest 
of science I have shared in a small way. He draws his 


212 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


plan; it must work. He constructs a model; it doesn’t 
work. Does this mean that his plan is wrong? Not yet. 
He must first examine his design and discover where it is 
inconsistent—where his imagination was defective. If 
critical imagination still justifies the plan, then, facts or 
no facts, it must work; the trouble must lie in the model. 
And he does not arrive at truth (although he may be over- 
borne by “‘facts”) until imagination is satisfied. He may 
easily discover that his imagination was defective. It is 
very likely to be so. And herein lies the value of laboratory 
experiment; it helps the imagination. But this only means 
that imagination may more or less anticipate fact; more 
in some men, less in others. So far, then, as imagination 
is in good working-order it gets further into reality, on 
the basis of the reality already grasped, and needs not to 
wait passively for the deliverance of fact.* 

This union of consistency and fact, or of consistency and 
experience, is well described by Professor A. E. Taylor 
in his “Elements of Metaphysics” as ‘immediate experi- 
ence’, though it is not brought out to my own satisfaction 
that immediate experience implies imagination. What I 
would drive home, then, if I can, is that this immediate 
experience is no ‘‘mere experience” but an experience of 
reality. And therefore another illustration. A few years 
ago the newspapers were for some time full of a case in 
which a man and a woman had been found in a lonely 


* For those who insist upon the ritual of verification I will relate the follow- 
ing, told me by a salesman in a department-store. A woman came to his 
counter and asked for a pencil and piece of paper upon which to do some 
calculation. After a few minutes she returned the pencil and departed, leaving 
her calculation upon the counter. It was found to be this: $1.00 

ahs 
$1.75 
I wonder if any reader of mine could conceive that by such his mental arith- 
metic had received an added shade of “verification”. 


TH he be by PLE N.CrwO Bett ® U, To rag hes 


spot, clearly murdered. There were several clews of 
more or less significance, but the case has remained a 
“mystery”. I need give no details. I will simply point 
out that if your imagination is working on such a case it 
is working really towards a certain goal: namely, the 
immediate experience of the murderer. His experience 
(let us say—it need not be true absolutely) would give us 
the reality. But how would you get at that experience? 
There are no rules. It would be a “moral” rather than 
a logical process, a matter of insight and intuition based 
upon the situation, including the human situation, as thus 
far presented. Yet the successful intuition would be a 
grasp of the whole reality. You would then see the 
situation as the man himself saw it; and in that seeing 
there would be a fullness and a coherence of detail which 
would be—not, as I was about to write, its own authentica- 
tion of reality, but reality itself. 

And it matters not for our conception that you never 
quite get that finally full and critical grasp, and that fact 
is therefore almost invariably illuminating. For though 
you get it not before the fact, neither have you got it com- 
pletely after the fact, and certainly not from the “dead 
weight” of fact. Truth is relative, and relative to 
sophistication; and its nature is apprehended if we can see 
the difference between the earlier and the later stage of 
sophistication. 

As a final illustration—very significant for any moral 
conception of truth—TI will instance the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ. I do not believe in the resurrection of Christ, 
and it is unlikely that I shall believe in it—not, however, 
as I conceive, upon any a priori grounds, logical or scien- 
tific, but because I do not expect to find the satisfying 


274 MORAL. PHILOSOPHY 


evidence. What would that evidence be? Well, in read- 
ing the accounts given in the gospels, which tell us that 
Jesus met several persons after his resurrection and con- 
versed with them, one’s feeling is, I think, if only those 
conversations had been recorded! If only those meetings 
had been presented so vividly and fully that in reading 
the accounts we could measurably find ourselves there! 
Then we should know whether Christ had risen or not. 
And we should know it through a critical appropriation of 
the experience then offered us. Suppose that a dead friend 
of yours appeared to you—say in your sleep. Suppose 
that you then had an old-time heart to heart talk with 
him. A real conversation; not a Platonic or Berkleian 
“dialogue” in which it is the chief function of one person 
to say ‘‘Very true” to the other, but a conversation in which 
each response stands for fresh thought. Suppose that he 
communicated and made intelligible to you some of the 
experience of death and resurrection. Could any logician 
ever convince you that it was not your friend, and that he 
had not returned from the dead? And then why is it 
that the spirit-manifestations of psychical research remain 
so unconvincing? Not, I should say, because of any de- 
fect in scientific method, but because the spirits when 
they return have so little to tell us. 


CHAPTER XVI 
THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 


§ 67. Knowledge and “communion with the divine”. § 68. The 
motive of knowledge and the motive of love. §69. The idea of 
God and the presence of God. 


HE purpose of this essay on the critical life has 
been to develop the motif of self-consciousness; to 
follow it, I might say, to the end. But to this pur- 

suit, it should now be clear, there can be none but a temporal 
end. There can be no logical conclusion: the critical 
process reduced to a conclusion would be a reductio ad 
absurdum. And therefore the intention of these two con- 
cluding chapters (which are to form a continuous discourse) 
is not to arrive at a conclusion but to suggest the deeper 
and more comprehensive question; which will yet express 
the realities of human nature and of human life so far as 
it be a significant question. In the end what is being 
presented is a point of view; and the last term in a point of 
view is not the top-story of a house, its security guaranteed 
by the solidity of the under-structure, but a horizon, where 
vision is dimmest and least certain and thought is more 
than ever of the nature of opinion. 


Truth, it has just been said, is the expression, not of 
theoretical consistency, nor of verifying fact, but of satis- 
fied imagination; and a satisfied imagination (to the degree 


that imagination is ever satisfied) is an immediate experi- 
275 


276 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


ence of reality, an awareness of the presence of reality. 
But to speak of a satisfied imagination is at once to ask 
what will satisfy the imagination deeply and if possible 
finally: what are the desires, the yearnings, of an unsatis- 
fied imagination? This is to raise the question of religion; 
its meaning, its reality as something more than a form of 
words; and then to ask about the significance of religion 
for human experience in general, and especially for the 
experience expressed in poetry and art. 


§ 67 


For what I would say of religion I find a convenient 
text and introduction in the following from Burnet’s “Greek 
Philosophy”: ‘Greek philosophy is based on the faith that 
reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the 
soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion 
with it. It was in truth an effort to satisfy what we call 
the religious instinct.”” In modern terms this means, as 
he explains, that Greek philosophy was more akin to reli- 
gion than to science. The Greek philosophers were not 
“intellectualists”’. 

Yet the motive fundamental to the Greek imagination 
was the desire to know. And it is in connection with this 
motive that I would consider the faith that reality is di- 
vine. That reality is divine—what does this mean more 
than that reality is real? What is meant by “the divine’? 
To me this can mean only that reality is personal—it surely 
does not mean that reality is merely big, or that it is 
merely mysterious—and. therefore it means that impersonal 
reality is a false or merely conventional appearance. 

I should put the matter simply, by saying that reality 
is God, if this were not to suggest an appeal, not as I 


THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 277 


intend, to the religious imagination, but to the current 
system of theology (the science of God!) for which “God” 
is a person if not indeed the only person. Now in the logic 
of the religious instinct it may very well be that for you 
or for me God is just one person—and for each a different 
person. The system of theology, however, in which God 
is conceived as “‘the Lord and Proprietor of the Universe”’ 
(in Butler’s phrase), the absolute monarch, the sole 
creator of moral distinctions and the sole arbiter of the 
worth of men—this “system” is to me less suggestive of 
the religious instinct than of the logic of authority. Its 
appeal, I should say, is not to the soul of man but to the 
conveniences of social order, and in particular to the su- 
preme convenience of conceiving the human social order 
as continuous with the order of the universe, thus bringing 
the fear of God into the government of men. It is in this 
sense only that I can understand why a faith definitely 
monotheistic must be the religion of civilization. This 
means, however, that the conception of God as one and 
only is the expression of the same administrative con- 
venience as that which prescribes one President for the 
United States or for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hence 
as against this systematic view I prefer to speak generally, 
if vaguely, of “the divine”, and of the presence of the 
divine as in another connection one might speak of the 
presence of the human. 

For a concrete sense of the divine presence and an 
obvious expression of the religious instinct one is likely 
to turn not to the wise and cultivated but, say, to the 
Russian peasant, to whom it seems that God is ever vaguely 
present, or to the desert Mohammedans in whom religion, 
“the factious passion of their Semitic souls”, as Doughty 


278 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


puts it, suggests “the Lord’s hand working in all about 
them’, and “they call upon God in every mouthful of 
words”. For them it seems, in the words of Thales, that 
‘all things are full of gods”. But in thus appealing to 
the mujik or to the Bedouin we seem to be clearly turning 
our backs upon the critical life. And this is to state 
the question forming my first topic, namely, whether “God” 
or “the divine’ is a term of significance for any critical 
imagination. Does “God” express an idea or is it only 
a word—a verbal expression which sophisticated reflection 
has shown to be without meaning? This I believe to be 
the form which the question tends finally to take. He to 
whom ‘“‘God” conveys an intelligible meaning will, I sus- 
pect, ever hesitate before a final disbelief. The conclu- 
sive disbelief expresses itself by saying that, whatever the 
word may mean to others, it means nothing to me. 

My suggestion will be, then, that critical reflection, so far 
from dissolving the conception of the divine, only makes 
the conception truly significant—if under critical reflec- 
tion we include the consciousness of self. For it seems 
true enough that reflection upon “the world’—the world 
presented by the sciences, notably by astronomy and 
geology, a world extended in an infinity of space and time 
in which you and I are nowhere—tends to dissipate the 
meaning of divinity. But this is not the world in which 
we live, and reflection confined to such a world is not re- 
flective human experience. Any least reflective human ex- 
perience involves a consciousness—an even painful con- 
sciousness—of self; the presence in me of an activity of 
intelligence which “naturalistic” explanations of human 
life persistently overlook. When, for example, naturalism 
ascribes religion to fear it is usually upon the assumption 


THE PRESENCE:‘OF THE DIVINE 279 


that fear is a blind “impulse”. It makes a difference when 
(with Marett in his “Threshold of Religion”) we ascribe 
religion to awe; for “awe” suggests a reaching out of the 
mind, at least a curious wonder. And when religion is 
ascribed to an infantile sense of dependence it is well to 
remember that the child’s sense of dependence upon his 
mother is not his ‘“‘sense of dependence” upon the floor 
that supports him. In his mother he is seeking a respon- 
sive intelligence. 

In the ninth chapter, in which I said that for me the 
motive fundamental to life is to know, I distinguished two 
all-the-world different versions of knowing, namely, im- 
personal, scientific knowing which yields as its realities 
“things” and personal knowing, or insight, which yields 
persons. Now it may help to clarify my present meaning 
(if also to reveal the peculiar weakness of my mind) if 
I say that my vocation to philosophy came, all at once, in 
my last year at college from reading Martineau’s “Types 
of Ethical Theory”; and that some fifteen years later when 
I had been several years a teacher of philosophy, and was 
now utterly weary of it and ready to escape, my vocation 
was renewed, permanently it has seemed, by reading Royce’s 
“The World and the Individual”. To the non-academic 
reader I may explain that among English-speaking phi- 
losophers of half a century past these two are possibly the 
clearest representatives of a “dangerously unsound” “‘imag- 
inative style” which tends to personify its realities. I am 
not committed to the doctrines of either writer. But it 
will state my point of view to say that it has become my 
most assured conviction that the logic of this “style’’ is 
the only true logic of knowing. 

This is to say that in the last analysis the only intelli- 


280 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


gible experience of knowing is a person’s knowing of an- 
other person; namely, personal insight; and on the other 
hand that impersonal, scientific knowledge, so called, is 
not knowledge but the negation of knowledge. To me it 
seems that, as Kant suggested a century and a half ago, 
science is not so much knowledge as a method of prediction; 
and a method of prediction which latter-day pragmatism 
has shown to be dictated by practical purposes. A marvel- 
lously successful method indeed—for me this constitutes 
the perplexing problem. And when I reflect upon science’s 
power of elaborating its predictions I seem compelled to 
admit that the conceptions of science, even the most purely 
mechanical (which means, the most distinctly scientific) 
must stand for some sort of knowledge. But this is still 
to say that science is not simple truth but only one point of 
view, one way of taking the world, among others; and it 
is likewise still to say that in science as elsewhere truth— 
as distinguished from so-called ‘‘verification’’—is satisfied 
imagination. And it seems to me that so far as science is 
more than bare prediction, so far as its conceptions are 
more than mere methods, so far as its facts have meaning, 
it is by the presence and operation of that ‘‘anthropo- 
morphic” sort of thinking which modern scientists so un- 
sparingly condemn. To me the more purely “scientific” the 
form or language in which a subject-matter is presented 
the blanker it seems, the more meaningless and unreal; and 
I can begin to believe that (in accordance with Newton’s 
first law) a body in motion must move until stopped and a 
body at rest must rest until moved when I reflect that I 
myself do not feel it necessary to move or to stop moving 
until I have a reason for doing so. 

And if you ask me whether I do not know when I am up 


TivVE PRESENCE /ORVEEUECD IWIN EB 281 


against facts—alas! when my money is all spent, or when 
I knock my head in the dark against the edge of an open 
door, I know as well as the next man that I am “up against” 
something. But to be ‘“‘up against” is, I should say, not yet 
to know; it is rather (to borrow for my own purpose a word 
from Professor Dewey) to undergo. I do not begin to 
know the fact, or object, until it is grasped in imagination 
and made intelligible; I do not know it finally until imagi- 
nation is satisfied. 

And it may illustrate the point of view to repeat what I 
have suggested elsewhere, namely, that in my opinion two 
centuries of modern philosophy devoted mainly to the 
problem of knowledge have never really touched the point 
of knowing. And this because the discussion has been con- 
ducted wholly in terms of the so-called knowing of in- 
animate things, supposed to offer a ‘“‘simple”’ and typical 
case of knowing. Berkeley, for example, begins with “the 
table I write upon” as his example of knowing. Presently 
he is reminded of his fellows; and then, with a shameless 
inconsistency but a no less significant insight, he makes it 
clear that he knows them far more certainly than he knows 
“the table I write upon”. But the table remains for him 
and for all subsequent discussion the typical case of know- 
ing; and what course the philosophy of knowledge would 
have taken had our fellow been made the type, remains an 
interesting speculation. 

This, I hope, will give a human meaning to the thesis 
that to live is to know. When Aristotle begins his ‘‘Met- 
aphysics” by saying that all men desire by nature to know, 
suggesting indeed that in human nature knowing is funda- 
mental, he surely does not mean that the soul of man is 
exhaustively defined by the desire for the successful pre- 


282 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


diction of fact. Aristotle was not a scientist in the orthodox 
modern sense, restricted by the rules of his profession to 
statements of temporal coexistence and succession of 
‘“phenomena”’, but what might better be called a naturalist; 
exercising an imagination more or less animistic in an 
outreaching curiosity about the inner nature of things, 
and seeking an insight into Nature of the same sort, ulti- 
mately, that we seem to have into our fellow-men. This 
naturalistic curiosity is the most distinctive sign of “life” in 
men or, as I have suggested above, in the beasts of the field. 
When the cow raises her head from the grass and slowly 
looks at you, then you know for certain that she is a living 
being. It is therefore not properly to be described as 
“animal curiosity”, rather as “‘a lively curiosity’, a lively 
intelligence seeking insight. Every pulse of life is such a 
thirst for insight. The old lady, who, relieved of life’s 
heavier burdens, now keeps herself alive by playing soli- 
taire—she too is seeking insight. In a certain unsatisfied 
curlosity, it might be said, lies all the difference between 
being alive and being dead. 

Of this we have a depressing realization when to the 
struggling self-consciousness it seems that being dead, or 
being torpid, is the more pervasive aspect of experience; 
when we note how small the circle of light in most moments 
of vision, how immense the surrounding dimness, and how 
helpless our attempts to penetrate it. Royce has pointed to 
the logical significance of the ‘“‘sluggishness” of our minds. 
To me it seems that the chiefly striking fact about human 
experience, surely most significant for any theory of human 
life, yet mainly overlooked both in logic and in psychology, 
is the evanescent quality of all actual experience, the rapid 
fading of impressions as they pass, and the resulting con- 


THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 283 


centration of our mental activity upon the task of reinstat- 
ing the experience in its living reality. The symphony of 
César Franck which I heard a few weeks ago—I talk about 
it today with enthusiasm and with conviction, yet all the 
while I know that what I now have before me is mainly an 
echo, an abstraction, a ghost of the living experience. 

In this sluggishness of the mind I am tempted to formu- 
late the whole problem of life. To me it seems that the 
chief “burden” of living, be it great or small, and all the 
weariness of life, resolves itself into confusion of mind; 
and all weakness of will amounts in the end to simple 
uncertainty. The task is never too heavy when we know 
what we have to do—at least we are resigned. In modern 
life especially, in which the diminishing necessity for phys- 
ical effort is overbalanced by a multiplied responsibility, 
the indulgence we crave from our neighbors is that they 
should not add to our problems, and their helpfulness in 
time of stress consists in doing our thinking for us. And 
thus it seems that all moral weakness and disloyalty and 
estrangement must mean that men forget—imagination is - 
dull. When one sees a man and wife facing one another 
in the divorce court with a venomous bitterness, one’s first 
impulse is to wonder whether either now recalls what the 
other was for him twenty years ago. Could we remember, 
could we only preserve the personal meaning and vividness 
of the experience of life once actually our own, we might be 
spared the baser humiliations. Let our experience be as 
limited as you please, we should still enjoy a fair measure 
of free and honorable living, true to ourselves and masters 
of ourselves. The problem of living is the problem of 
knowing, and the desire to live is the desire to know. 

Hence the character, as I conceive it, of the unsatisfied 


_— 


284 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


imagination: its search for reality in the form of an eternal 
life in which, simply as the fulfilment of life, all shall be 
known. ‘For now we see through a glass darkly, but then 
we shall know, even as we are known.” It will suggest the 
universality of this appeal to the imagination, its presence 
as a motive in the religious instinct in whatever form that 
instinct may take, if by the side of the biblical quotation I 
put the following from Joseph Conrad: 


“A heavy atmosphere of oppressive quietude pervaded the 
ship. . . . The problem of life seemed too voluminous for the narrow 
limits of human speech and by common consent it was abandoned to 
the great sea that had from the beginning enfolded it in its immense 
grip; to the sea that knew all, and would in time infallibly unveil 
to each the wisdom hidden in all the errors, the certitude that lurks 
in doubts, the realm of safety and peace beyond the frontiers of sor- 
row and fear.” 


§ 68 


But, as I have suggested, for a more intimate realization 
of the quality of knowing—and thus of living—we must 
turn to our relations with our fellows. Now we may be 
told that in these relations living is not so much a matter of 
knowing as it is of loving. And therefore, I reply, of 
knowing. For to me the very meaning of love, and all the 
charm and delight of loving, lies in understanding. I 
might then state the motive both of loving and of knowing 
in terms of the motive of intimacy. In some such motive 
must we look for that union of feeling and intelligence, of 
love and knowledge, which is implied in Plato’s conception 
of love as the inspiration of philosophy and Spinoza’s 
“intellectual love of God’. Even curiosity about nature 
seems to imply a desire for personal intimacy; in the words 


THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 285 


of Burnet, we desire to “enter into communion” with her. 
In human relations this is the pervasive motive—even in 
the midst of hate. Suppose that in old-fashioned terms we 
compare the pleasures of life in the quest for the summum 
bonum: shall we not say that the sensuous value of things 
is in the end of little consequence compared with their 
“social” value? What, for example, is the meaning of 
“wealth”? Here is a man setting up an establishment: 
without the apparatus of hospitality the establishment would 
be commonly of little use; and perhaps also apart from the 
fimpression—involving a recognition—to be made upon 
those who are to be excluded. It is hard to conceive of 
any seriously considered action which will not in some 
fashion be an invitation to one’s neighbors or of any ap- 
paratus of life which will not turn into a vehicle of ex- 
pression. And in the development of institutions it is very 
interesting, and not seldom curious, to see the social motive 
displacing the useful. ‘College spirit” is commonly a 
stupid affair; yet even so it means that the human relation- 
ships consequent upon meeting for a common purpose tend 
to make themselves the chief meaning of the purpose. 
But human rather than “‘social’. For the term “‘social”, 
implying today a public rather than a private and personal 
relation, conveys only a diluted suggestion of what I mean. 
And therefore I prefer the term “intimacy” as recalling us 
to the self-consciousness of the critical life. If from any 
introspective standpoint (from which we measure the value 
of things for the critical life) we ask which of the goods 
of life are of real value for you and for me—rejecting now 
all of those intrusive ‘‘social” and “public” considerations 
—for myself I seem to find but one answer: the only deeply 
satisfying things are the personal intimacies. All of the 


286 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


casual ‘‘social’’ goods are of value only as they retain the 
flavor of the personal (which, curiously, they always make 
a pretence of doing). And all of the ostensibly impersonal 
interests, such as an interest in books, in scientific investi- 
gation, in social reform or commercial enterprise—which, 
it seems, are necessary to give breadth and substance to 
life—these again take on the quality of life just so far as 
they furnish the subject-matter of intimate intercourse. To 
my own imagination indeed the greatest pleasure in life 
is a quiet talk by the fireside or a stroll in the country with 
a congenial soul when, business and convention both for- 
gotten, each is for the time being his unembarrassed self, 
and there is a mutual unburdening of the spirit, a mutual 
enlargement of mind. The scholar’s delight in a book is 
a pleasure of this kind; though he misses the immediate 
response, he is probably enjoying his author at the author’s 
best. And it seems to me that he who in this human sense 
is at home in the world, who in the circle of family and kin 
finds an ever satisfying affection and understanding, and 
in his friends an intelligence ever responsive to his tastes, 
has the best that life has to offer; and that he who lacks 
these lacks everything. No impersonal breadth of interest 
can replace this quality of intimacy. 

But this is once more to think of life as a problem. Of 
how many persons can it be said that they are thus at home 
in the world? Unimaginative persons recommend love as 
the easy cure for human ills as if love, the crown of the 
virtues, were also the simplest; and they think it simple 
for a man just to be himeslf. It is simple, I suspect, for a 
simple person, just as it is easy for an easy-going person 
to make friends. Of personal intimacy he knows corres- 
pondingly little. To be oneself sincerely and to take one’s 


THE PRESENCE. OF THE DIVINE 287 


personal relations seriously is at once to appreciate the 
difficulties of understanding, along with the special delights 
of understanding between natures highly individuated, and 
at the same time to become aware of the complications 
presented by repressions, suspicions, defensive reactions, or 
what not; of all those contradictions which the Freudian 
psychology has uncovered in the impulses of sex, making 
them inarticulate and ashamed by their very intensity, but 
which, it seems to me, are characteristic of all self-conscious 
human nature. It is rather notorious that culture, which 
refines the sympathies and quickens the thirst for them, 
does not therefore make brotherly love easier. Among 
persons of good breeding it seems to be agreed that the 
most distinctive mark of a refined consideration is that we 
shall not touch one another—which means, somewhat 
paradoxically, that nothing is so repulsive to our sense of 
touch as our human fellow. Simplicity and frankness 
attained in and through these complexities of human nature 
mark a rarely assured self-consciousness. So remote from 
the intercourse of every-day life is the natural enjoyment of 
sympathetic intelligence that in the poetic imagination such 
enjoyment becomes the special mark of a “Golden Age.” 

This enjoyment “‘the religious instinct”? then seeks in the 
experience of “communion with God’. Communion with 
God is to be an intimacy more deeply satisfying than any 
possible human intimacy. To the imagination of the 
mystic it is the final experience both of love and of knowl- 
edge. But to speak of “intimacy” in this connection is 
inevitably to be reminded of the current theory which ex- 
plains religion as only one of the phenomena of unsatis- 
fied sexual desire—at first glance the least edifying among 
theories of religion; yet at the same time a theory which 


288 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


anthropological research makes it difficult to ignore. 
Primitive religious ceremonies are often sexual orgies, and 
even in modern religion the language of impassioned devo- 
tion is full of erotic metaphor. Yet coolly considered I do 
not see why this association should be especially depressing; 
or why it should be more depressing at least than the more 
general consideration, forced upon us by biological evolu- 
tion, that all of human life, all that is finest in human 
imagination, has its roots in our animal nature. Or why, 
in reverse fashion, the association of sex and religion may 
not be taken to point to the meaning—the personal and spir- 
itual meaning—of the relation of sex. To the modern 
imagination this relation stands for the most intimate of 
personal relations; it is the personal relation par excellence. 
In modern literature it is connected with most of the 
poignancy of life, and by the side of it the enjoyment of 
“friendship”, which appears to be the ideal personal rela- 
tion of classical literature, seems thin and uninspiring. 
Marriage, says Jeremy Taylor, is “the queen of the 
friendships”. 

Now it is not necessary to say that sex is all of life or 
all that is personal in life. In the logic of personal rela- 
tions there are perhaps no a priori necessities. Yet the sex- 
motive in literature is no mere modern convention, but a 
revelation—of tragic depths of human nature to which the 
imagination of classical times was simply obtuse. If (as 
Plato seems to imagine) the sex-appetite were indeed only 
a physical appetite, like the appetite for food, there would 
be no “‘sex-problem”. The sex-problem would then be a 
simple economic problem, one among the other problems 
involving an exchange of services. It is because the rela- 
tion draws into itself so much of ourselves that there is a 


Poiteerk  SEN Col ORS oH ep LV INE 289 


special “‘problem”’; it is because marriage embodies so much 
of personal aspiration that we discuss its “failure”. But 
this failure of marriage—so often precisely where marriage 
means most—may then be viewed as simply a crucial il- 
lustration of a universal spiritual problem; the problem, 
namely, of satisfying our imagination in intercourse with 
our fellows—even such a problem as the common sense of 
social life betrays by substituting the game of bridge for 
the inadequacies of conversation. The more intensive self- 
consciousness (always abnormal from any common-sense 
point of view) serves only to suggest a certain inevitable in- 
adequacy in every form of social intercourse. The final 
result of the culture of the spirit is then what a recent writer 
describes as ‘“‘the awful incommunicability of souls”, ex- 
pressed in a mutual recognition of the loneliness of any 
more thoughtful form of life. 

And therefore, as I have suggested, the quest of the un- 
satished imagination for communion with God. But here 
once more we are confronted with doubts and questions re- 
garding the nature of the motive. Since God is so often 
the refuge of broken lives, of disappointed love or personal 
bereavement, we face the suggestions of a theory of “‘com- 
pensation”’; or once more the suggestion that any intense 
desire for communion with God, such as marks the mystic 
or the devotee, is the fruit of a morbid imagination. Yet 
I wonder why the idea of God should not be a “compensa- 
tion”. This would mean only that the thought of God is 
suggested like any other thought, by the presence of a need. 
How should men think of God as long as human intimacies 
satisfy? And then IJ need only repeat what was said above, 
that a morbid imagination may be (even must be, I should 
rather say) a special source of insight. When I hear men 


290 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


speak of the religion of a sane and normal mind I am 
tempted always to ask why a sane and normal mind should 
be interested in religion; or in anything beyond the foot- 
ball games and the market-reports. Thoughts of religion 
are suggested commonly—one might almost say, normally 
—by the presence of death. Thought itself in any graver 
sense comes from the tragedy of life. One may conceivably 
deny (as I suppose Professor Dewey would deny) that there 
is any “‘tragedy of life”. But this is only to say that when 
we speak of the “tragedy” of life we locate the quality of 
“life” in the poignantly personal—not in the impersonally 
rational and practical. There is nothing properly tragic 
in losses by fire and flood considered in themselves, or in 
any losses of a merely “worldly” kind. The tragic loss is 
the personal loss, typified by personal bereavement, and the 
tragic unfulfilment is the unfulfilment of those deeper per- 
sonal longings of which the sex-longing is illustrative—but 
only illustrative. 

Illustrative, however, of any of the deeper, i. e., of the 
religious stirrings of life, whether in the form of personal 
love or of reflective thought or of aesthetic taste. Let us 
recall the faith which for Burnet satisfied ‘‘the religious in- 
stinct”’; ‘“‘the faith”, namely, “‘that reality is divine, and that 
the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the 
divine, to enter into communion with it”. It has been my 
purpose here to suggest that every impulse of the mind is 
an attempt to “enter into communion”—with a reality such 
as to respond. ‘‘For at the bottom of much of our desire 
for great poetry,” writes Vernon Lee, ‘“‘is our desire for the 
greater life, the deeper temperament, for the more powerful 
mind, the great man’”—and there is something similar, I 
suspect, at the bottom of our desire for scientific knowledge. 


THE PRESENGB*OFR THE DIVINE ~—291 


But the desire for the great man inevitably leads the imagi- 
nation beyond man. ‘The conception of the divine will then 
be as variously personal, the person of God will be (and in 
logic must be) as variously temperamental, as the many 
who seek him; but for each the search for the divine will 
be a desire for personal communion. ‘Thou hast made us 
for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in 
thee.” This classical expression of Christian piety is, it 
seems to me, a true revelation of the religious motive. We 
find the same personal motive, however, in a total difference 
of tone, in the hymn of praise to Zeus of the Stoic Cleanthes, 
beginning with “O God most glorious”: 


“We are thy children, we alone, of all 
On earth’s broad ways that wander to and fro, 
Bearing thine image wheresoe’er we go.” 


And again the same motive, strange to say, now clearly un- 
satisfied and defeated, in Bertrand Russell’s picture, in the 
peroration of his essay on “A Free Man’s Worship”, of the 
free man hurling defiance at an insensitive universe. The 
significant revelation of this striking passage,’ it seems to 
me, is ‘“‘the heart of man’—for there is surely no logic in 
defying an insensitive universe. Russell’s free man, sup- 
posed to represent the ultra-sophisticated man, may then be 


1 The passage is as follows: ‘Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him 
and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and 
evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for 
Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through 
the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty 
thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the 
slave of Fate to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undis- 
mayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton 
tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces 
that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain 
alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have 
fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.” 


292 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


regarded as almost a perfect expression of the unsatisfied 
imagination, an eloquent testimony to the loneliness of a 
universe in which there is no divine presence, and once more 
an evidence that God—the divine—is the inevitable imagi- 
nation of the human consciousness of self. 


§ 69 


And yet it may seem that all of this is only to demonstrate 
a difference between the imagination of the divine and any 
sense of the presence of the divine, between the idea of God 
and the presence of God. Hence I will carry the theme 
further by asking what it means to have an idea of God. 
Here we are reminded of the traditional “‘ontological argu- 
ment’’ for the existence of God, which, in substance, derives 
the existence of God from the existence of the idea: I have 
an idea of God, therefore God exists. Now the question- 
able feature of this argument, to my mind, is not the “logic” 
of it. Really to have an idea of God, I will suggest, is 
to know that God does exist. The question is what might 
roughly be called the question of fact: Have we an idea 
of God? And what does this mean? 

Now in the traditionally “logical” sense of idea—as im- 
plying a consistently systematic view, complete and free 
from all internal contradiction—I should say that we have 
clearly no idea of God. ‘The conception of God as one 
person, eternally living yet eternally satisfied, omnipotent 
yet permiting freedom, benevolent yet tolerating evil, be- 
yond all moral weakness yet sympathetic with weakness— 
this if anything is a mass of problems and contradictions. 
And yet if this means that we have no idea of God it seems 
also to mean that we have no idea of our fellow-men. For 
any of them, subjected to a sufficiently careful scrutiny, ap- 


ition > ENCE OF oT BET DIVINE 293 


pears to be similarly a mass of contradictions. Not only, 
then, have we no idea, say of Plato; we have possibly least 
of all an idea of those who are nearest to us. Yet of them 
it seems that we have certainly a personal experience, and 
an assurance of their presence. 

But when I turn to the personal experience as constituting 
the idea, I am reminded of those words of Christ: ‘He 
that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall 
he love God whom he hath not seen?’’ When we remember 
that “loveth” must include ‘“‘knoweth” this seems to suggest 
that the experience of God may be for any human capacity 
of imagination almost impossibly difficult; and thus in the 
end any real belief in God. And this leads me to ask, 
What survives of belief in our human fellows (not to speak 
of love) when they have ceased to be present to the senses— 
when they have been long absent? What remains of our 
belief in those who are long ago dead? 

As I was pondering this question in the middle of a sum- 
mer vacation and seeking a way of stating what it means 
to me, I happened to be reading again George Eliot’s 
“Scenes of Clerical Life’? and it occurred to me that “Mr. 
Gilfil’s Love Story’ would help me to state the point. 

The story begins with the death of Mr. Gilfil. Mr. Gilfil 
was an elderly Church of England clergyman of the kind 
that George Eliot loved to draw—‘“‘who smoked long pipes 
and preached short sermons’’; a shrewd, matter-of-fact, and 
rather sceptical old gentleman, more distinctly “sound” than 
“spiritually-minded”’. Also a rather reserved man who 
lived much to himself, an aristocrat and a gentleman, yet 
popular in his parish because of a benevolence which duly 
respected the animal want; and welcome at every farmhouse 
because, himself a man of a little property and a breeder 


294 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


of cattle, he could discuss breeds of cattle and the like in the 
farmer’s dialect as man to man. Mr. Gilfil, in short, was 
an unromantic old gentleman, and as a clergyman probably 
a fit subject for evangelical suspicion. 

Forty years before, however, Mr. Gilfil had buried the 
wife who had been the pet and playmate of his boyhood and 
youth. She is pictured as a rarely lovely child (one thinks 
of her as a child), the orphaned daughter of a penniless 
Italian painter, bred from infancy in the quiet manners and 
sober traditions of an English country house, yet inheriting 
the dangerous southern passions which after an experience 
of treachery and deceit—when for the time her imagination 
had wandered from Maynard Gilfil—had all but issued in 
bloodshed. Mr. Gilfil’s brief year of wedded happiness 
was the sadly peaceful end of a troubled story. 

The memory of Caterina had then become Mr. Gilfil’s 
religion. Her room, carefully preserved as she had left it, 
his sanctuary. Her name was rarely spoken. Few per- 
sons remembered her existence. This, however, was Mr. 
Gilfil’s love story. 

A very sentimental story, it will be said today—“very 
old-fashioned’’, was the comment of one of my friends, an 
anti-Victorian. But to suggest that the story is sentimental 
is precisely to put my question. For as one reads the story 
one hardly grieves for Mr. Gilfil. It seems indeed that he 
enjoyed the greatest gift of life, a supreme and satisfying 
devotion. But as I lay the story down disturbing questions 
arise. As Mr. Gilfil sat night after night before his fire, 
with his pipe and his book (or his newspaper) and his 
glass of gin and water, did the vision of Caterina never 
waver? Did her presence after the lapse of years never 
forsake him, leaving him to wonder whether after all she 


Peter RE SEN CE OF pokey DIVINE 295 


had been real, whether his love had been more than a youth- 
ful infatuation, whether his loyalty had not now become 
a formal gesture? For myself I prefer not to think so. 

But the question will serve to mark the issue between 
sentimentalism and realism. For to call Mr. Gilfil’s story 
sentimental means simply that we charge his author with 
claiming for him a depth of experience, a power of imagi- 
nation, beyond the human capacity. We mean that his 
worship of Caterina was not a genuine experience, animated 
by a steady sense of her presence, but a gesture, a form of 
words. But this is only to put the logic of the issue—the 
logic of the experience of God, as I have it in mind—in line 
with the logic of morality as explained in Chapter XII; 
where it was said that the morality of an action is a ques- 
tion simply of the intelligence, of the genuineness of the 
experience lying behind it. And in line with the logic of 
beauty, the beauty of an object being similarly a question of 
how far the object is merely an object or an “expression” — 
of a genuine experience. 

In all of such matters the logic is neither the logic of 
mathematics (or of abstract metaphysics) in which truth 
is determined by the law of contradiction; nor the logic of 
science, in which truth is determined by the power of fact; 
but the less determinate logic of interpretation, of ap- 
preciation, of criticism; the logic of divination, one might 
almost say, yet the logic of all extra-scientific human inter- 
course, of all in which it is a question, from your neighbor’s 
action and his words, not of deducing their consequences, 
but of realizing the experience of which they are the ex- 
pression. Such is distinctively the logic of literary and 
artistic criticism. When the critic tells you briefly that 
some of William Blake’s verses are poems, others are only 


296 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


verses, you will be raising the question of logic when you 
wonder (as I often wonder) how he knows. And such also 
is the logic of the “inspiration” of any sacred scriptures, 
Christian, Mohammedan, Mormon, and of their status as 
a revelation of the divine. Their truth is not a question of 
historical authenticity, much as this may help to show what 
they mean; still less of miraculous attestation. Let their 
origin be what you please, they would be just as true or just 
as false as they are now. The question is a question of 
content and significance, of what they have to reveal; the 
logic of their inspiration is the logic of poetic inspiration. 
In the logic of criticism, the reader will perceive, the 
judgment of significance is the affirmation of a ‘“‘presence’’, 
of the reality somewhere in the spiritual world, if not in the 
world of space and time, of a personal existence. It was 
this aspect of the matter that led me to link Mr. Gilfil’s 
story with the presence of the divine. For what is involved 
in the story is somewhat more than the preservation of a 
memory of sense-experience (though one may ask how the 
perfect preservation of a memory can differ from a present 
experience). A thoroughly cynical critic may ask whether 
Maynard Giifil had ever really known Caterina, whether 
indeed her loveliness was more than a simple illusion of 
sex. And this will remind us that, even in the case of those 
who are most distinctly with us in the flesh, our grasp of 
themselves is a work of insight, of imagination. Do we 
not know that the prophet may be least recognized in his 
own country and his own house, and that husband and wife, 
father and son, may be least fitted to know one another? 
And it may help to link the logic of our neighbor’s 
presence with that of the divine presence if I refer once more 
to what it means to be a “lover of books’, Among under- 


THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 297 


graduate students it seems, strangely, that the presence of 
the writer is the last thing to be grasped; yet to me it is 
the one important reality. Take such a work as T. H. 
Green’s lectures on ‘Political Obligation’, a deservedly 
classical work in political philosophy, yet assuredly drab 
and unadorned; brief and compact, yet exasperatingly— 
conscientiously—repetitious. Green is profoundly con- 
vinced that the cause of authority is the cause of God—and 
of Man. But he is too sensitively honorable not to explain 
where the cause seems weak, too innately respectful of his 
fellows not to give their opposing views a sympathetic con- 
sideration, and too much a lover of liberty to preach author- 
ity except in its name. To grasp these several motives is 
to find in a sober academic treatise a dramatic conflict, no 
less dramatic because quietly serious, within a human soul. 
It is to feel Green thinking; to experience the ‘‘presence”’ of 
the man even more immediately than if your hand held his 
pulse. He who expects to find in the book only a system 
of facts and arguments will miss the point entirely, and it 
will not be strange if he shall say that, in the mutual destruc- 
tion of argument by argument, in the sum-total he finds 
nothing there. 

Of such sort, as I take it, is the logic of any sense of the 
presence of the divine; of such sort precisely though imply- 
ing an exercise of imagination of vastly greater range and 
import; yet still natural as our knowledge of our fellows 
is natural, and drawn from life as any inspiration of poetry 
or intuition of beauty is drawn from life. 

Hence—just as a matter of sophistication, if you please 
—I feel that I must treat any ostensible experience of the 
presence of God with a certain reverent, though never un- 
discriminating, expectancy. In his introduction to the 


298 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


Everyman Spinoza, Santayana concludes Spinoza’s message 
by saying: “It counsels us to say to those little gnostics, 
those circumnavigators of being [1. e., those who have ven- 
tured to claim for themselves an experience of God]; I do 
not believe you: God is great.” ‘This is hardly to credit 
Spinoza with the humility appropriate to a philosopher. 
And it seems to me that both a juster and a subtler warning 
is conveyed in the words, ‘“He who loveth not his brother 
whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath 
not seen?” For myself, I will not resent my neighbor’s ex- 
perience of God until he insists upon making this ex- 
perience the major premise of a “‘system”’ of theology or of 
metaphysics. Then perhaps I may protest that “God is 
great.”” Meanwhile, having in mind the logic of human 
experience, and the arbitrary nature of any limit placed 
even upon human experience, I feel compelled (at the 
least) to agree with William James when he says, “I firmly 
disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest 
form of experience extant in the universe.” ” 

In all of this I am speaking mainly from the external 
standpoint, from the standpoint of the other person who is 
the critic of religious experience. For myself it often seems 
as if all of my own religious experience could be summed 
up in a wonder, curious and critical, yet not irreverent, not 
unbelieving, and even at times envious, about the religious 
experience of others. And yet I am not quite certain. 
When I try to state a fact (in answer perhaps to a ques- 
tionnaire) about any very personal experience of my own, 
it seems that the word “‘fact”’ becomes strangely inapplicable, 
and I seem to find here, in this most intimately personal 
part of life, a curious lack of distinction between stating a 


2 Pragmatism, page 299. 


THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE 299 


fact and creating it. And then I wonder what would be 
a minimum of religious experience. To me so much at 
least seems certain, that to seek the presence of God in one’s 
own life is only fundamentally rational; and it may illus- 
trate my sense of the rationality of this if I point to those 
two seemingly very simple novels of William Hale White, 
“Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography” and his ‘“Deliver- 
ance’’, in which an evangelical sense of the presence of God 
seems somehow to survive a Spinozistic conviction of the 
bigness and hardness of the world, as literature which I 
have read and reread with an absorbing interest and which 
appeals to me as a dramatically faithful presentation of re- 
ligious experience. And then I must wonder whether even 
Bertrand Russell’s “free man’, anathematizing the in- 
sensitive universe, is not the expression of a religious 
experience—whether even this attitude, supposed to rep- 
resent the merest of mere ideas, can fail to imply some sense 
of a divine presence. Certainly if we found a lower animal, 
a dog or a monkey, thus expressing himself, we should find 
it hard to dissociate such an accession of self-consciousness 
from the idea of a divine revelation. 

Accordingly, in the “logic” of the situation, it seems to 
me that we must take any expression of religious experience, 
as we would take any piece of poetry, both sceptically and 
expectantly, for what it will reveal of the possibilities of 
experience and of insight. In such judgments we are not 
merely expressing a taste, we are analysing realities. The 
Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Koran, the Book of Mormon— 
one need not, I think, be committed to any Christian 
theology to grasp a real difference between the Gospel of 
Christ and the Koran, and a possibly greater difference 
between either and the dull inanities of the Book of 


300 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


Mormon. And yet one might hesitate before pronouncing 
even the last to be absolutely meaningless, before declaring 
that there was no vision whatever in the mind of the prophet 
Joseph Smith. And this measure of criticism I would 
also apply to any individual religious experience. I will 
not reject it as simply strange. Take the following from 
’ Henry Ward Beecher (quoted by Leuba and James): “In 
an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking 
care of those who put their trust in Him that for an hour 
all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and 
I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh.” I can- 
not conceive of any such exaltation of my own spirit as 
would make this view of the world presently real to me; yet 
it does not pass my comprehension. At the worst I can- 
not make it mere words. And if real as an experience it 
was an experience of reality; of reality as apprehended by 
one temperament, one form of receptivity. And what would | 
be reality apart from any form of receptivity, I do not 
know; to me this is unreality. 

If, then, it be objected that the forms of receptivity are 
possibly infinite, and if I am then asked how are all to be 
included in a systematic unity of reality, the unity of God 
the Absolute, the reply must be (as suggested above) that 
to my view the conception of the Absolute is a derivation 
from the needs of business administration. For the needs 
of business I have a wholesome respect, but I will not make 
them a criterion of divine truth. 


CHAPTER XVII 


POETIC ILLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH 


§ 70. Poetry and religious experience. § 71. Experience as ex- 
perience of the real. § 72. Man as an animal and man as a human 
being. 


§ 70 


66 ND so religion is merely poetry and piety is but 

one form of aestheticism among others!” Such, 

I fear, may be the summarizing response of 
many a reader to what has just been said in the last chapter. 
But to speak of “merely poetry” would indicate that I have 
failed to convey my meaning—for me mere poetry is mere 
words. And in thus identifying the logic of religious ex- 
perience with the logic of poetry it has been my purpose not 
to ‘“‘reduce”’ religion to the level of poetry but, if you please, 
to raise poetry to the level of religion; and thus not to 
simplify the problem of truth but to make it more por- 
tentous. Religious inspiration, I say, is of the same order 
as poetic inspiration. True, but genuine poetry as then 
conceived will be the expression of an experience of the 
same order as religious experience. And as such it will be 
a revelation of reality, of the presence of the divine. 

On the other hand, any truly religious experience will 
then be the expression of a poetic nature. I have said above 
that no person is entitled to be called moral who is lacking 
in imagination; I will now add that no such person is en- 


titled to be called religious. The language of personal 
301 


302 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


piety may very well be that of an unschooled mind (not 
therefore of an unreflective mind) whose experience of the 
great world is small, whose experience of literature and the 
arts is little or nothing. It is not impossible that one may 
thus enjoy a deeper realization of the meaning of life. Per- 
haps we may say that piety is only the poetry of such a 
mind—it is at least that; on the other hand, since poetry is 
at home only in a more or less personal or personified 
world, it may be that in the language of personal piety we 
have the most characteristic, even though the less developed, 
expression of the poetic motive. Be this as it may, to me 
it is quite inconceivable that a genuine piety may be con- 
joined with a positive insensitiveness in other matters. 
There must be some pervasive tenderness in the nature of 
the man and some fineness of perception, or I cannot grasp 
the attitude as religious. A religion of finally hard logic, 
a religion of pure authority, is to me finally brutal and 
meaningless. 

For any proper development of this theme I have had un- 
fortunately too little “experience” of poetry. It may amuse 
some readers to be told that, though “acquainted with the 
poets” all my life like any other not illiterate person, I have 
only rather lately begun to be interested—only after philo- 
sophical reflection had assured me that poetry ought to be 
significant. But it may contribute to my question to ex- 
plain in part why this has been so. First, because poetry 
has been commonly represented, even by lovers of poetry, 
in terms of ‘‘the poetic illusion”. This means that poetry 
is a source of polite amusement and entertainment for cul- 
tivated persons. And—I do not know whether it is an 
excess of sophistication or a defect of imagination, but I 
am not amused by illusions. Nothing interests me very 


POETIC ILLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH 303 


much except as it promises illumination. Nothing is really 
amusing except as it is also serious. There is for me no 
humor in a jest, a pun, an epigram, except as it be subtly 
just; otherwise it is merely tasteless. And I seem to have 
noted that the smile of.a child indicates that he has grasped 
something, that the conventional smile of greeting is sup- 
posed to express recognition; and that the old gentleman 
sitting opposite me in the library who has been reading 
for an hour past with a facial expression of mingled per- 
plexity, irritation, and disgust—when he breaks out into 
a broad smile I know that he has got the point. 

More deterrent, however, than the conventions of poets 
and critics of poetry have been (for a professional teacher 
of philosophy) the conventions of philosophers, and in par- 
ticular those of the philosophical tradition in which I have 
lived. Philosophy, I suppose we may say, is a criticism of 
life; of all life; a criticism of art and poetry and religion 
no less than of science. Philosophy is human experience 
and human life becoming conscious of itself. But not even 
may philosophers be expected ‘“‘to see life steadily and see 
it whole’, and philosophical traditions show selective varia- 
tions. In the rather slender Italian tradition, for example, 
it seems that philosophy is mainly a criticism of history, of 
history conceived as an FErlebniss, as something lived 
through. And thus in the style of Croce and Gentile, and 
even perhaps of Varisco, there is a suggestion of the 
dramatic and the poetic which may very well strike our own 
philosophers as scandalously sentimental. For in our own 
tradition, inherited chiefly from Britain and Germany, and 
concentrated in the issue between Hume and Kant, philos- 
ophy is mainly a criticism of natural science. Kant’s great 
critique, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, could be justly 


304 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


entitled, “What is Science?” His critiques of “Practical 
Reason” (morality) and of “Judgment” (taste) are minor 
critiques. 

Accordingly, in framing a formal definition of philosophy 
almost invariably do we define philosophy in the single 
relation to science, usually in accord with the traditional 
conception that philosophy is the ‘“‘science of sciences”. Or 
if we think of philosophy as criticism we then define it as 
a criticism of the presuppositions of science—as if there 
were in human life and human thought no other presup- 
positions worth criticizing. In much of contemporary 
philosophy science has ceased merely to supply the material 
for criticism, she now provides also the standards of 
criticism. When also it is our purpose to defend or to jus- 
tify philosophy we do so to, or against, science. And if we 
wish to distinguish serious philosophy from dilettantism, 
serious philosophy from popular philosophy, it seems that 
we must distinguish it as “scientific philosophy. Our 
whole conception of philosophy is the expression of what 
I have elsewhere described as ‘“‘the scientific prepossession”’. 

From this point of view the term precisely antithetical to 
philosophy is—poetry. A private person may then ex- 
cusably divert his idle hours by the reading of poetry; or 
even a natural scientist (if he cares to do so), since poetry 
is sO uncompromisingly remote from science and the 
scientist’s strength of mind is already guaranteed. For the 
professional philosopher the enjoyment of poetry even as 
recreation is a reflection upon his intellectual chastity. And 
should he aspire to be himself a poet—or (by way of 
parallel) a novelist—I may quote for his benefit the most 
devastating criticism of a philosopher within the range of 
my personal experience, a remark referring to Royce: ‘Yes, 


POBTIC FLLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH 305 


he has written several books of philosophy—and a novel!” 

And yet it may also help to give shape to the general 
question that I have in mind if I confess that, though read- 
ing little verse, I have not been totally insensitive to poetic 
impressions, at least of the more vulgar and commonplace 
sort. I have in mind a charming illustration of a passage 
in Kingsley’s “Water Babies” in which Tom, the Water 
Baby, “looked up at the broad yellow moon . . . and he 
thought that she looked at him.” This is a simple expres- 
sion of what the philosopher or the sophisticated critic calls 
“the pathetic fallacy”. But I suspect that this fallacy, this 
illusion, this Schein, as the Germans call it, is of the order 
of what Kant calls necessary, at least empirically necessary. 
For in the solemn stillness of a moonlit night, with a broad 
expanse of nature lying before me, it seems that the moon 
also “looks” at me, and to me also she seems to speak with 
an overpowering directness; not now indeed of thoughts of 
love, nor precisely of thoughts of death, but of thoughts 
of eternity; of the immeasurable generations of men whom 
(as I recall Hans Andersen’s story) she has “seen”, and 
whose monuments lie now extended before her in a view the 
significance of which no human imagination, even no his- 
torian’s imagination, can adequately conceive. Only in 
such moments do I seem quite to realize that being in time 
I am also in eternity, and that this experience of present life 
which seems to vanish towards a horizon of misty vague- 
ness must yet be continuous with an infinite experience be- 
yond. 

In the stuffiness of one’s study, in the sober bareness of 
the scientific laboratory, the notion of a “communication”’ 
from nature seems an empty conceit; a poetic convention 
indeed, but a silly convention. It is different, I think, for 


306 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


even the less imaginative of men in the presence of nature 
herself. To me it seems that the mere escape into the open 
after the confinement of work brings a certain mental ex- 
pansion. A relief to the nerves, it will be said. But why, 
I wonder, this postulate of “nerves”? Why not an illumi- 
nation, a new field of vision? What strikes me most forci- 
bly in any absorbing experience of nature is the strange- 
ness, in this view, of the other world of common life. It 
seems now that it is science that has become the convention; 
and the scientific description of nature now seems nearly as 
remote from the immediate experience as the poetic impres- 
sion is remote from the experience of the laboratory. To 
confine the realities of the moonlight scene to those of 
mathematical physics is only less a strain upon the imagi- 
nation than to conceive one’s best beloved in terms of physi- 
cal chemistry. 

And most remote and roundabout seems then the scientific 
description of the poetic impression, of this my immediate 
experience, which, to avoid the implication of a “‘communi- 
cation” suggested by the experience itself, will convert the 
poetic impression into an “association of ideas”, a play of 
pictures within the gallery of the mind. This explanation, 
obliged at the outset to limit the stimuli of association to 
what can be put through sense-organs and brain-paths, must 
then complete its story by a chain of reminiscences extend- 
ing indefinitely backward to the uncertain experiences of 
primitive man or to the equally uncertain instincts of our 
animal nature. And the result, it seems to me, in thus dis- 
posing of communications from nature, is to render equally 
remote any communications from our fellow-men. 

Meanwhile it seems that something has been communi- 
cated. Let it be nothing more, if you please, than a vague 


BPOPErroc LLU USLON-AND POETIC TRUTH 307 


communication of the reality of eternity. Yet in this in- 
tuition of reality, and in a mass of other communications 
similarly poetic, lies all of the material of philosophical 
questioning, all that stimulates philosophy to think about 
a world; and in such also lies all that sense of living in a 
world (and not in a picture-gallery) which fills the back- 
ground of consciousness in daily life. Among the other 
poetic impressions is the conception of a scientific universe. 
Kant showed us long ago that while scientific method may 
indefinitely link fact to fact it can never grasp a universe. - 
Without the capacity for poetic impressions where should 
we be? And if these are not communications where are 
we? And therefore I have to wonder whether Tom, the 
Water Baby, was guilty of a “fallacy”, pathetic or other- 
wise, when “‘he looked up at the broad yellow moon... 
and thought that she looked at him”. 

The question, it will be perceived, is once more the ques- 
tion of “mere ideas’. ‘The theory of the poetic illusion 
means that poetry is a mere idea; and a mere idea is an 
activity of the soul, yet without illumination. To me this 
is unintelligible.’ And therefore, whatever the difficulties 
of the conception, I seem compelled to think of poetry either 
as somehow a grasp of reality or as having no mental qual- 
ity whatever. 

And then my question; which I may put—very seriously 
—by asking what is implied in a sophisticated sense of 
humor. For to many persons it marks an undeveloped 
sense of humor to find no enjoyment in illusions when they 
are known to be illusions. Let us recall, then, the picture 
presented above of the professor of science and the pro- 
fessor of poetry in the academic faculty. By the logic of 
his profession it would seem that the professor of science is 


2 


308 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


obliged to despise the professor of poetry as a teacher of 
falsehoods; as a parasite, at best a trifler. To the professor 
of poetry, on the other hand, the professor of science is a 
person lacking in insight. Yet the two get along very well 
together on the basis of “the poetic illusion”. ‘The pro- 
fessor of poetry takes his illusions very seriously, yet he 
hardly ventures to teach poetry as sober knowledge. On 
the other hand, the professor of science is not indisposed 
to adorn a scientific discourse with a bit of verse at the 
end; and he may even recommend the courses in poetry to 
his son as a part of the education of a gentleman; conceiv- 
ing (strangely) that a taste for what is true should be sup- 
plemented by a taste for what is false, and that illusions 
are somehow good for the soul. The question that troubles 
me is this: whether this unanimity of interest in illusions, 
known to be illusions, is the mark of a sophisticated sense 
of humor or a subject for it. 

I will then close the topic by pointing to a poem of George 
Herbert which seems to me very nicely to suggest the ques- 
tion of the logic of the experience both of poetry and of 
religion. ‘“‘When God at first made Man”’, after bestowing 
upon him all of the other riches of life, he hesitated and 
thought best to withhold the gift of mental repose. 


For if I should (said He) 
Bestow this jewel also on My creature, 
He would adore My gifts instead of Me, 
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature, 
So both should losers be. 


Yet let him keep the rest, 
But keep them with repining restlessness: 
Let him be rich and weary, that at least, 
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness 
May toss him to My breast. 


Rogeerct Lt. USLON AND POR TIGsT RUT H.309 


In these graceful lines the poet of “The Church Porch”, 
from whom we expect only a serene and even a childlike 
confidence, has sounded the whole “tragedy” of life. At 
the same time he has suggested, in terms very intelligible 
from the point of view of recent psychology, that in this 
“repining restlessness”, in this experience of conflict and 
dissatisfaction with things as they are, lies the only road to 
a sense of spiritual realities. The poem might then be 
described as a poetic-religious version of a philosophical 
truth, at least of a philosophical problem. But (and this 
is the question) why a “version”? Let us assume, if you 
please, that you or I would find other terms more im- 
mediately intelligible. Yet if we have here only a version, 
in what terms shall we state the original? What, in other 
words, is God’s language, the language of truth, which 
describes things as they really are? It is too naive to sup- 
pose today that the divine language was Hebrew, and it 
is too cheap to smile at the suggestion; but are we now to 
say that the language of absolute knowledge is that of 
mathematical notation and symbolic logic? And if it then 
be objected that we cannot describe or conceive of reality 
itself except in one version, finally objective and authori- 
tative (and for practical purposes it may be that we can- 
not), then the question will be whether this is not our limita- 
tion, perhaps our misfortune. 


§ 71 


It will be evident, however, that the question is not con- 
fined to the significance of expression in the form of verse— 
or in the form of words. ‘The poetic marks only what is 
typical of all imaginative experience; and in the last analy- 
sis it becomes the mark of all experience so far as this is 


310 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


personal experience and not a “registration” (one thinks 
here of a human adding-machine) of abstract fact. And 
thus I go on to suggest that the quality of objective il- 
lumination which has just been claimed for the experience 
of poetry is a quality of all genuine experience; and that 
it is therefore especially to be looked for in those regions in 
which experience has become relatively articulate in the 
several forms of artistic expression. 

The several arts may be taken to represent so many dif- 
ferences in native quality of imagination; and interest in 
poetry rather than in music, or in music rather than in 
painting, may then be taken to mark the direction in which, 
for this man or for that, things become most intelligible; to 
mark, in other words, the peculiar direction of his personal 
logic. ‘This personal logic is never indeed wholly to be 
described as a preference for one form of art to another; 
nor may it be finally stated, in psychological terms, as a 
distinction between (e. g.) a “visual” and an “auditory” 
type of memory or of imagination. Yet it is instructive 
to be told, for example, by a critic of Walter Pater, that 
Pater was not so much in love with youth as with “‘pic- 
tures” of youth. True or false of Pater, it may at once 
occur to us that this ‘‘picturesque’’, or predominately visual, 
quality of imagination helps to explain the peculiarity of 
the point of view which we take to be distinctively “French”; 
its marvellous lucidity and (to our sense) corresponding 
“superficiality”; its desperate regard for appearances, what- 
ever else be lost, its sensitiveness to ridicule and preference 
for ridicule as a weapon of offence. But such differences 
of imagination may be found, I suspect, at the roots of 
abstract science. Enriques, the Italian historian of science, 
traces two lines of development in modern physics corre- 


PAyeeetC LLL USTON ANDO POETIC LE UT Hw Stt 


sponding to national and racial differences in thinking; a 
French, Cartesian physics, based upon vision, which states 
its conceptions in the form of mathematical equations, and 
an English, Newtonian physics, based upon the senses of 
touch and movement, which thinks in terms of working 
models. And it seems to have been at bottom an issue be- 
tween a visual and a muscular imagination when Leibnitz 
contradicted Descartes by saying that it is not the quantity 
of motion that remains unchanged in the universe but the 
quantity of force, or energy. 

It is then his quality of imagination that determines for 
each of us, like a Kantian form of thought, what is to be 
for him intelligible. For most persons it seems that a prop- 
Osition is best made intelligible by presenting it, in the form 
of graphs or diagrams, to the eye. And the visual form 
of presentation has at any rate the “objective” advantage 
of being easily communicable. But there must be many 
others to whom, like myself, an important avenue of in- 
telligence is the ear. To me as to most persons my neigh- 
bor’s face is an indication of his character and intelligence, 
yet I seem to be more attentive to what is communicated in 
the quality of his voice. The face is appearance—it may 
be true or false; but the voice reverberates directly the in- 
telligence of the soul. And this preference for the sound 
of things goes so far that for me the drama is utterly false 
while the opera is relatively true to nature. I find that I 
am not believed in this; yet it seems that IJ have never wit- 
nessed the presentation of a tragedy which did not—and 
then only in the best moments of such artists as Edwin 
Booth and Duse—give me that irritating sense of make- 
believe which we have when some one off the stage is ‘“‘play- 
ing a part’; on the other hand, when Isolde sings her 


she MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


lament by the side of the prostrate Tristram it is to me all 
most natural, most logical, most real. 

Hence, granting the deficiency of imagination that may 
be urged against me, I seem for my own part obliged to 
believe that the experience which appeals to the ear, so 
far from being a sign or symbol of some other kind of ex- 
perience supposed to be intelligible in itself (which is prob- 
ably the more common view), has a logic of its own and 
a message of its own. And I suspect that the logic of 
musical harmonies and relationships enters far more deeply 
into our criticism of literature and even of philosophy than 
we are commonly aware. For my own part it does not oc- 
cur to me to attempt the conventionally logical ‘““demonstra- 
tion of a proposition” in the case of anything which cannot, 
like my balance at the bank, be reduced to figures. In all 
other matters it seems that I must be content to convey an 
impression. In the effort to do this I seem to discover that 
“ideas” (so called) refuse to abide by formally logical defi- 
nitions and insist upon developing infinitely various though 
characteristic suggestions, like Wagnerian motifs. It is 
this refusal of ideas to conform to the rules laid down in 
the logic and grammar of words, that seems to constitute 
all the difficulties both of thought and of expression in their 
subtler aspects. The statements may be formally correct 
and logically coherent, yet the assemblage of words full of 
discordant suggestions, of ‘‘false notes’’, which reveal them- 
selves only to something like a musical ear; the effect of 
which is to convince me that what I am trying to convey 
is not so much a proposition as an impression. And when 
I then ask myself what would be satisfying as a form of 
expression ideally and completely logical, I find that I am 
not thinking of anything resembling a syllogism, but of 


POBtrIC ILLUSLONMAIND POETIC TRUTH 313 


such a balance of emphasis in the development of a theme, 
such a suggestion of harmonies among considerations and 
ideas, as we look for in a symphony or a symphonic poem. 

Devoted believers in the significance of music find in a 
great experience of music ‘“‘a revelation of the divine’. To 
the scientific critic, interested mainly in the historical de- 
velopment of harmonic relations, of the symphony, or of 
“the sonata form”, the conception of musical appreciation 
as insight is a phenomenon of adolescence. And lovers 
of the plastic and pictorial arts, conceiving that their own 
taste is more intelligent (or more “‘intellectual’’) because it 
is more visual, are disposed to treat the lover of music 
as a sentimentalist, not to say a sensualist. The student of 
physiological acoustics explains, moreover (following Helm- 
holtz), that the difference between tone and noise is re- 
ducible to simple auditory comfort. To my mind, all of 
these considerations, important and interesting in them- 
selves, and relevant to the special analysis of musical mean- 
ing, are irrelevant to the purpose of showing that music has 
no meaning. If Beethoven was an incident in the develop- 
ment of the sonata form, equally incidental must have been 
Shakespeare in the development of the sonnet form; and if 
consonance and harmony stand for ease in the process of 
audition what shall we say of the mechanics—the rhyme 
and the rhythm—of verse; or for the matter of that of the 
mechanics of prose? Let it be remembered that human 
audition is a process, not of “registration’’, but of conscious- 
ness; animated, therefore, by the impulse to grasp and to 
understand. To say that a certain relation of tones is 
easier to grasp is then only another way of saying that it 
is more intelligible. Some sort of physical fitness and 
physiological adjustment must be postulated for every 


314 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


vehicle of expression. To point to such conditions in rela- 
tion to the life of a conscious being is then only more pres- 
singly to raise the question of meaning. 

And thus we may ask why the greater and more inspired 
music should not be conceived as a revelation of the divine. 
What I have tried to suggest is that in the interpretation of 
human experience “communion with the divine”, in however 
slight a sense, offers the only alternative to a merely animal 
existence. Every genuine creation in the realm of experi- 
ence is thus in some measure a revelation of the divine— 
every vision of things that transcends, or breaks in upon, 
the commonplace experience of fact, as a creation and not a 
copy. And if this idea is suggested oftener in connection 
with music, it is probably only because music by its very 
nature is less obviously exposed than some of the other 
arts (painting in particular) to the eae interpretation 
that art is an imitation of fact. 

In any case I seem to share the adolescent experience— 
and still after many years in which just this experience has 
been for me a constantly interesting question. Not indeed 
that the hearing of great music brings with it necessarily 
the sense of transcendental insight; but only that this is 
what I seem to get on the rarer occasions, not of emotional 
exaltation, but rather when I am capable of the soberest 
and clearest attention and can grasp, not again all the 
significance that is there, but the presence of so much beyond 
that I do not grasp. At any rate, if the words in which 
we speak of “a divine revelation” stand for anything in 
human experience, for me it is this experience. Some time 
ago I heard unexpectedly—having accepted an invitation 
on the spur of the moment with no prevision of program— 
an orchestral rendering of Bach’s “‘Passacaglhia’”’, a new and 


Pattee LUStTONTAND POET LGA RUTH 315 


glorious addition to my realm of experience. My mind had 
been full of a perplexing pedagogical and philosophical 
problem which called for practical solution in a day or two 
to come, namely, how to explain to a few hundred immature 
students the meaning of Plato’s theory of transcendent and 
supersensible ideas—how, I mean, to make this conception 
of transcendence intelligible from the point of view of human 
experience. As I listened to Bach it became suddenly clear 
to me that if I could convey that experience they would see 
what Plato meant, and that without some such experience 
the theory of ideas could never be for them more than a 
form of words. 

I will then for convenience put my general suggestion (or 
question) into the form of a thesis: the thesis, namely, that 
all human experience, so far as it is experience, and not 
mere words or the like, is an insight into reality—into an 
“other” and a “beyond” in reference to any mere “‘presenta- 
tion” —and that all experience has thus a logical quality, 
or a quality of intelligence. 


So much, then, for the remoter suggestions of the critical 
life. ‘To many readers this may seem a strangely romantic 
version of critical intelligence; quite fantastic also from the 
standpoint of fact and common sense. And there may be 
some to discover in these suggestions of the critical view 
of life the philosophy of that ingenious gentleman, Don 
Quixote de la Mancha. I will not venture to dispute the 
comparison; it is sufficient to indicate that i have it in mind. 
But if this be taken to mean that “the critical view of life” 
is indifferent to fact and experience (words commonly con- 
joined), my reply will be that far as I have indeed strayed 
from the world of fact I have not wandered so far from the 


316 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 


world of human experience. Fact is one thing, experience 
is quite another. The world of fact, as I have suggested 
in Chapter XI, is, whatever else it be, one creation of imagi- 
nation among others; and precisely what is meant by “fact” 
in our world of experience, is a nice question. As “point- 
event” items in the stream of thought it seems that facts 
have ever been the smallest part of human experience; they 
are the smallest part of what comes and goes in the mind 
of any living man. But any resolute pursuit of the ques- 
tion of fact would call, not for another chapter, but for 
another volume. 


§ 72 


Meanwhile it is human experience that I have had in 
mind, and human nature. And the point of view of 
“humanism”. For humanism as I conceive it the issue lies 
—the moral issue and no less the issue of truth and reality 
—between man as an animal and man as a human being. 
And for humanism human nature is not even human un- 
less it be also divine. For animalism, i. e., for a view of 
life resolutely biological, truth and reality are restricted to 
animal fact, defined as “‘sensation”. Sensations are the 
sole material of reality and test of truth. For humanism 
there is no aspect of human experience, no working of 
human imagination, which is not a revelation of reality— 
“nothing which has ever interested living men and women 

. no language they have spoken, no oracle beside which 
they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once 
been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about 
which they have expended time and zeal.” And then the 
other words of Pater: ‘“‘only be sure that it is a passion— 


Power ic ILLUSION AND POETICOLTRUTH 317 


that it does yield you the fruit of a quickened and multiplied 
consciousness.” Be sure, that is to say, that your words 
and deeds are significant and not mere sound and gesture. 
Such I conceive to be the whole meaning of truth and of 
morality. 





INDEX OF NAMES 


Addams, Jane, 125. 

Addison, 36. 

Andersen, Hans, 305. 

Aristippus, 56. 

Aristophanes, 224. 

Aristotle, 3, 25, 28, 29, 35, 38, 74, 
SOM sie logos Ole 

Augustine, 224, 238, 291. 


Bach, 314. 

Balzac, 162. 

Beecher, H. W., 155, 300. 

Beethoven, 55, 313. 

Bentham, J., 30, 37. 

Bergson, 133, 254, 264. 

Berkeley, 176, 267, 271, 274, 281. 

Blake, William, 295. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 184. 

Bosanquet, Bernard, 76, 77, 201. 

Bradley, F. H., 78. 

Burnet, Professor John, 276, 284, 290. 

Butler, Bishop, 15, 18, 49, 61, 62, 225, 
Beowed ts 


Calvin (Calvinism), 201 (note). 

Carlyle, 67 ff., 161, 184, 188, 208, 222. 

Cicero, 64. 

Cleanthes, 291. 

Conrad, Joseph, 284. 

Croce, Benedetto, 3, 4, 95 ff., 157, 159, 
passim in ch, xi, 179, 262, 303. 


Darwin, 88. 

Daudet, Alphonse, 188. 

Descartes, 252, 311. 

Dewey, John, 57, passim in ch. viii, 
281, 290. 

Dickens, 161, 235. 

Dostoievsky, 26, 262. 

Doughty, Charles M., 257, 277. 


Edison, 114. 
Eliot, George, 51, 203, 214, 235; “Mr. 
Gilfil’s Love Story”, 293 ff. 


Enriques, F., 310. 
Epicurus (Epicureans), 35 ff., passim 
In Chae 230: 


Freud (Freudians), 107, 287. 
Friends (Quakers), 149. 


Gaskell, Mrs., 93 (note), 235. 

Gentile, Giovanni, 303. 

Giorgione, 154. 

Green, T. H., 29, 62, 77, 244 (note), 
297. 


Hammurabi, Code of, 15. 
Helmholtz, 313. 
Helvetius, 30. 

Herbert, George, 308. 
Hobbes, 143. 

Hume, 303. 


James, William, 97, 111, 131, 173, 
202, 219, 298, 300. 

Jesus Christ, 121, 174, 175, 273, 293, 
299. 

Jevons, W. S., 138. 

Jodl, F., 30. 

Jowett, B., 135. 


Kant (Kantian), 12, 36, 37, 49, 57 ff., 
73, 97, 100, 149, 176, 186 ff., 242, 
245 ff., 280, 303, 305, 307, 311. 

Kingsley, Charles, 305. 

Koran, The, 299. 


Lang, Andrew, 241. 

Lee, Vernon, 290. 

Leibnitz, 311. 

Meubaye jib 300; 
Lévy-Bruhl, L., 236. 

Lewes, G. H., 51. 

Locke, 173. 

Lucian, 224. 

Lucretius, 62, 199, 219, 236, 
Lumbholtz, Carl, 255, 


319 


320 


Macaulay, 204. 

Macchiavelli (Macchiavellians), 126, 
i275 

Marcus Aurelius, 15. 

Marett, R. R., 279. 

Martineau, James, 73, 279. 

Mather, Cotton, 66. 

Maupassant, de, 162. 

Merejkowsky, 262. 

Meyer, Eduard, 184. 

Michelangelo, 170, 

Mill, James, 37. 

Mill, John Stuart, 12, 37, 217, 268. 

Milton, 190, 207 (note), 214. 

Mohammed, 184, 188. 

Mormon, Book of, 299. 


Nemirovitch-Dantschenko, 65. 
Newton, 36, 280, 311. 
Nisbet, J. F., 262. 


Oliphant, Mrs., 235. 


Paley, William, 91. 

Pater, Walter, 115, 185, 208 ff., 258, 
310, 316. 

Pattison, Mark, 201. 

Pepys, 55 (note). 

Plato, 6, 25, 28, 35, 46, 77, 88, 132, 
224, 226, 242, 274, 284, 288, 315. 

Poe, 268. 

Poincaré, H., 235. 


Quixote, Don (Quixotism), 234, 315. 
Royce, Josiah, 111, 151, 173, 174, 279, 


304. 
Russell, Bertrand, 134, 210, 291, 299, 


INDEX OF NAMES 


Santayana, George, 201, 220 ff., 298. 
Schiller eh Cy Snel: 
Schopenhauer, 49. 

Schweitzer, A., 174. 

Shaftesbury, 18, 225. 
Shakespeare, 120, 313. 

Sinclair, May, 215. 

Smith, Joseph, 184, 300. 
Socrates, 3, 62, 132, 222, 224, 265. 
Sorel, Georges, 29, 30. 

Spencer and Gillen, 241. 

Spencer, Herbert, 68, 69, 70. 
Spinoza, 17, 284, 298. 

Stephen, J. F., 53, 68. 

Stephen, Leslie, 12. 

Stoics, 35, 36, 207. 

Strong, C. A., 156 (note). 


Taylor, A. E., 272. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 288. 

Thackeray, 109, 161, 221, 235. 
Tolstoi, 162, 181. 

Tourgenieff, 162, 213, 214. 
Trollope, Anthony, 91 (note), 235. 


Unamuno, Miguel de, 234 (note). 


Vaihinger, H., 235. 
Varisco, B., 303. 
Villon, 162. 
Voltaire, 64. 


White, William Hale, 299. 
Wilde, Oscar, 153. 
Wundt, W., 12. 


Xenophon, 224. 





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